DESERT GRAVES
Killers lurking in the Mojave twilight
Growing up in Las Vegas, I was always struck by the endless emptiness surrounding the city.
You go north on Ninety Five, leaving the neon behind, and within an hour there’s only rolling desert, horizon to horizon. A great vast nothing. Think of the eons that have worked across that land. The blood spilled. The secrets buried in the dirt.
I’ve recently published two short stories concerned with this history. The first is “Boy Detective” in Feign. This story is about a precocious kid named Mikey, who’s living with his fuck-up mom in a shit-hole motel in one of the seedier slums of Vegas. He befriends a retired homicide detective, who is haunted by the unsolved 1950s murder of a woman chained inside an abandoned house at ground zero of an Atomic bomb military test. As Mikey is pulled into the detective’s obsession, he tries to solve the decades-old case himself and escape his own troubled home life… but all is not as it seems.
Read “Boy Detective” now at the great Reno-based online magazine Feign.
Another story I published recently is “Romeo” in Starlite Pulp Review #7. This is a dark coming-of-age, true-crime-like tale inspired in part by the real-life serial killer Charles Schmid - known as the Pied Piper of Tuscon, who in the rock-n-roll scene of the 60s wore pancake make-up, prosthetics, and lifts to make himself appear younger and taller in his efforts to lure in and kill impressionable teenagers. The story of Schmid (which Joyce Carol Oates also riffed on in her amazing story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”) is more relevant now than ever before, in our age of dark influencers and bad-faith online pied pipers of disaffected young men.
In “Romeo,” an outcast high-schooler named Dante is befriended by a charismatic new student who calls himself Billy Romeo. As Dante is taken under the wing of the charming and increasingly ominous Romeo, he is lured into an ever-tightening labyrinth of dark paths, until he is faced with a single choice that will determine the course of his entire life.
‘Til next time, friendos!