First Snap of Winter Stories of Dread

Lon Chaney There is nothing more frightening than a clown after midnight. Hello I'm the clown. It's after midnight. A winter comes along and you are nine. It brings snow a friend and a lame pup in a world of caring mom and just what you wish. Knowing is winter terror that meets the scream which is a child framework of pain and never oblivion. The impossible to change doomsday as he walks through the door of God's counting house to the sky heave of one almighty crack of thunder. Want to be nine at Christmas forever? I'll show you. Come close. How about some freaks? When I was a boy the September carnival was 3 blocks from my house I would stand with tremble at the terrifying gibbering posters of the freak show tent always apart from the carny in the dark ashamed.. There's the alligator man with a horror of legal jurisprudence that makes him kill and kill again the monster he will only find from inside himself in sweaty hell revenge. The good thing about horror is its everywhere. At a prep school in Connecticut here a boy wears a scarf to hide the worst secret of all the most heinous crime a boy can commit. And in this world of angst he simply is crazy in their prosaic midst. He will take that scarf blood incrusted off and mad jolts of sickness will rush out. A teenaged Frankenstein a man's only friend and which mask is which as he walks down November streets of your small town in his own indefatigable dream because a real being does not throw a friend away. Court the cost of disfigured loneliness and have a look where love can lurk. That butterfly creepy on the cover of FIRST SNAP OF WINTER flies in from 1917 to herald the too languorous papery ugly headed insects with blood on their wings a son who kills himself because there was too much him in the world a father too late the truth a doctor who wraps it up in the butterfly killing room on a hot boiling summer day. Cold blood anyone? A girl who became a movie theater refreshment bar where it's KOOL INSIDE. An urban legend of an old woman who chillingly every night hears a non-existent baby crying. Reported as real. The thing has haunted me forever. 40 YEARS IN THE MAKING!!!!!. I give it an ending I don't think you will guess. I give you the Child LEATHERFACE. A town in a midnight basement where a boy sacrifices himself for his mother's happiness. A twisted lesson on the dangers of literal translation for it might be the death of you for sure the mystery of hands and salvation of at long last protective touch and a Chinese box within a box by a writer who has had one too many rejection slips and for a chaser---a walk into of all places hell. And the best of my book you may read as fiction then walk away but it is in many ways real to me and it and my other six books are roiling queasily in my brain and heart to stay. I can't walk away. Be seeing you in your-nightmares? Just remember nightmares see you too. 34 stories. 262 pages. A trade paperback. And on Kindle