But it did.

WHAT I’M READING: Mindscape by Andrea Hairston

WHAT I’M WATCHING: Eight Legged Freaks, Calendar Girls. We are going to keep one in our DVD library and get rid of the other. Any guesses which?

WHAT I’M WRITING: A haunted house horror novel, no title yet. I’ve also decided to put together another collection of my short stories, no title yet.

Here’s a photo for you.

I don’t do this often–making a book nearly free. So I hope some of you take advantage of it. When the sale’s over I may start experimenting with a price tag of over seven dollars. Or not. Haven’t decided.

Anyhow, A RESURRECTION OF STARLINGS is my best book so far. A horror novel about a mysterious and deadly train trip to nowhere. Here’s one of the reviews.

Like Agatha Christie, Gretchen Rix in person (as those who’ve met her at conventions will attest) is the last soul you’d suspect to be a writer of death and mystery. And like Agatha Christie, Gretchen Rix on the page seems absolutely born to write about death and mystery.

You don’t have to know the above to enjoy Ms. Rix’s short historical horror novel “A Resurrection of Starlings.” I only mention it for an added layer of enjoyment.

Set onboard a mysteriously halted (and mysteriously abandoned) steam locomotive in the winter woods of circa 1885 Texas, it’s the perfect bedtime read, a page-turner of pleasingly short chapters peopled with the strange, the brutal and the oddly familiar: a strong, flawed and distinctly unglamorous female hero, a malevolent child specter prone to tossing bloody snowballs, a horribly dismembered passenger gazing at their own corpse and, best of all, ethereal half-states of life and death, shifting between this world and the next in the drifting snows of silent woods and the hissing steam of a trapped train.    

Put “A Resurrection of Starlings”on your nightstand. It’s the kind of book horror and mystery fans should love to dog-ear. And when the book slips out of your hand each night you, heavy-lidded and fading, will hear, just faintly, the satisfying thud of a thing well done and all done…til tomorrow.

I’m so glad I encountered this author, a prolific sweet lady who writes of strange things in books that are just plain fun. Gretchen Rix’ writing feels real, and (take it from someone who knows) it feels really, really weird. Agatha would approve. So do I. 

You’ll enjoy. 

From Bill Oberst, Jr.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09NN64X2S/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3NFYSALUPYO25