2022 is half over.
The idea that time flies by quicker the older you get seems to be true. Where did the time go?
I have a horror novel to complete (I’m maybe 1/3 into it), a short story collection to get out (almost finished with the proofreading), and another novel to begin (don’t know if it will be the science fiction series I have going, or a continuation of my San Antonio detective series, or the third in my Boo-Done-It mystery series, or something completely random.)
My intrepid sister and I sold my books at the Cult Classic con in Bastrop, sold my books at Aggiecon in College Station, and sold my books at Greater Austin Comic Con in Cedar Park. All fun venues with friendly and interesting people. Two more to go.
We had to cancel out of the Watermelon Thump celebration due to the very hot weather. It was outside.
My latest book is called A Resurrection of Starlings, and it’s pretty damned good. BookPeople in Austin has about six copies of it they’d like to sell you. Amazon and Apple have the rest (except for the copies we take to the conventions).
Here’s a sample of what readers have said about it.
The Ain’t No Ordinary Train Ride
What just happened?
That’s what I kept asking myself as I read Gretchen Rix’s latest tale of the fantastic and horrible. Death and rebirth. Nightmarish recollections of concentration camps from prior centuries. Vicious zombie fights.
Reading this novel felt strangely familiar, as if the author had watched a nightmare of mine and took careful notes so she could recreate it on the page. Have you ever had a bad night’s sleep, where the same bad characters keep floating in and out of focus, trying desperately to harm you, succeeding, failing, exiting the frame one moment and coming back the next? That’s this novel. I felt twisted and turned and at the writer’s mercy.
And she ties it all together with a satisfying ending.
If horror is your thing, you really should read A Resurrection of Starlings.
AND THEN THIS
Who or what is in control?
This book has all the elements of things to keep you up at night. Repeated mistakes, days, events, the inability to leave, weather, remote area, the only nightmare of mine it did not have was the one about forgetting a locker combination. And the biggest question of all is who or what is in control? This was a quick read with light horror in a lot of ways yet heavy on the psychological aspects. It will leave you thinking. I did enjoy the alternate scenarios the author offered at the end of many chapters.
AND THEN THIS
A perfect bedtime read…short chapters peopled with the strange, the brutal, and the oddly familiar
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.
