BACK FROM THE DEAD

The Late Night Glow

“In the days following the tragedy, after the funerals were over and even the local papers had moved on to other stories, Albert stopped leaving the house.”

So begins my short story “Extinction Studies,” published recently in the amazing Cincinnati Review. It’s a story that took nearly my whole life to write, stretching back to thirteen-year-old me sitting in the dark in Las Vegas, face illuminated in the TV glow of late night sci-fi and monster movies.

“She handed him a boxless VHS tape with a yellowed label. She said she’d found it at a yard sale. A blood or cola stain obscured the title, but Albert was able to make it out in the light.

“Planet of the Apes.

“When they inserted it into the VCR, they were not surprised by Charlton Heston, whose blow-dried presence was familiar to them from Soylent Green and The Omega Man. But in this movie there was something electric about the crash landing onto an unknown planet, the humanlike apes and apelike humans, the blasted torso of the Statue of Liberty, the realization that this de-evolved world was their own future Earth.”

I didn’t live through the specific tragedy that befalls Albert, the teenage hero of “Extinction Studies,” but experienced enough death and abandonment and hopelessness in my own way. And like Albert, I found a way forward in the flickering dream machine in my living room, the midnight cathode ray fuzz of local TV, the one and only… Las Vegas’s own… Count Cool Rider.

Read about the Count in the full story online now at The Cincinnati Review.

New Book: THE BROKEN DETECTIVE by Joel Nedecky

I can’t wait to get my hands on the The Broken Detective, the debut novel by Canadian crime author Joel Nedecky. I’ve read the first thrilling pages already and can’t wait to have the book in my hands and dig in.

Check out Joel’s Substack, which includes links to other great stories featuring his haunted PI protagonist Jake Joelsen.