Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Some Southern-Fried Horror For Your Ears!


Hey folks... got a real treat for you over at Ronald Kelly.com. Thanks to our good pal and webmaster extraordinaire, Hunter Goatley, we now have some creepy horror audio for you in our Audio & Video Section. Hunter has worked some digital magic and concocted the following aurial assaults for your eardrums!
FLESH WELDER / Finally, the full-blown recording of my Croatoan chapbook, Flesh Welder, is available to the public for the first time. This recording was commissioned by Steven Lloyd of Croatoan around the time of FW's release and was expertly performed by master voice talent Wayne June. You can now listen to the 5-part novella in its entirety.
DARK DIXIE: Tales of Southern Horror / Hunter recently digitalized and remastered my audio collection of Southern horror tales put out by Spine-Tingling Press (yes, the same one that was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Non-Musical or Spoken Recording back in 1992). This audio collection includes such old-time favorites as Miss Abigail's Delicate Condition, Yea, Though I Drive, Papa's Exile, The Cistern, and Black Harvest. This 7-part series also includes the original introduction and author bio.
UNDERTAKER'S MOON / We also have the 4-part audio excerpt of the prologue to my Irish werewolf novel, Undertaker's Moon available. This was also commissioned by Croatoan and dramatically read by Wayne June.
POD OF HORROR #52 / Now you can listen to my Pod of Horror interview with Mark Justice via the Ron Kelly website and hear my Tennessee accent in all its Southern glory! This interview included discussion about the Zebra years, my ten-year hiatus from horror, my comeback, and my upcoming work. You can listen to my interview only, or the entire Pod of Horror #52 broadcast, including Mark's interview with Clive Barker, the Call of Kalanta, book reviews, and more.
So head on over the website and download to your heart's content here:
Remember, it's absolutely FREE! Hope y'all enjoy it!

Thursday, May 21, 2009

Staying Grounded: My Monthly Dose of Blue Collar



As some of you know, I've been laid off from my job for a while now. What started out as a 30-day lay-off in mid-February has drawn out into nearly four months. And from the amount of business my plant has lost during that time, it doesn't look like I'll be called back soon.

Not that I'm complaining that much. I'm drawing a check from Uncle Sam that is close to the take-home pay I was getting every week and I'm getting to keep my health insurance (for now). So it looks like this coming summer will be spent with the kids and in front of the computer monitor catching up on my writing. So, like I said, what I have isn't too shabby compared to some folks who are hurting due to factory shut-downs and unemployment. At least I have something to fall back on and some very entertaining company (almost too entertaining sometimes!) here at the house.

Still, even with all the positive factors, I do tend to get restless sometimes. And, believe it or not, I get to missing the old workplace, even with its stress and down sides.

One of the conditions of keeping my health insurance is that I come in to work five hours per month. This consists of waking up extra early around the 10th of the month (the anniversary of my lay-off), dressing in my gray uniform (sorry, not blue) with the company logo above one pocket and the embroidered RON above the other, driving twenty miles to nearby Lebanon, clocking in, working my butt off for five hours, then clocking out and driving back home. The amount I earn in that 300 minute period must pay a hunk of my family insurance benefits, because when I recieve my check for the following week it usually amounts to around $1.56 after deductions.

But this blog isn't about the insurance, but mostly about going back to work and staying grounded in the real world. The world I grew up in. The Blue Collar world.

I come from a blue collar background. From folks that worked an honest day's work for little pay in return. The majority of my kin worked in factories or garages, while others worked the land, on farms they owned or didn't own. The farmers grew corn and tobacco; the others worked as forklift drivers, mechanics, or assembly line workers. My father worked in a tool and die shop for nearly forty years before retiring. Before that, in the Army, he worked in the motor pool, keeping the jeeps in proper working order. I remember growing up and smelling the thick scent of oil and raw metal on my father when he came home in the evening. It wasn't an alluring smell, and neither was it repulsive. It was simply the smell of hard labor and doing jobs that others -- the more educated -- neither had the desire or gumption to attempt. I'd smelled other odors on my grandfather and uncles after a long day in the fields; not oil and metal, but sweat and raw earth, along with the tang of tobacco juice on their breath. Their uniform was not the blue-collared garb of a machinist or mechanic, but felt hats, jeans, and long-sleeved shirts to protect their flesh from the merciless rays of the sun. Still, it found their faces and the napes of their necks, burnishing their skins an Indian brown and etching a roadmap of lines around their eyes and along their cheeks, spilling down the sharp, steep cliffs of their jawlines like waterfalls of character.

Since those of our bloodline attending college was as scarce as whiskers on a bullfrog, I joined the ranks of the working class following high school. Mind you, I still wanted to be a writer. More than anything else on the face of the earth I wanted to spend my days behind a keyboard, conjuring books and stories from my imagination. But it was necessary to work in the meantime. I had to make a living and take care of myself. At the beginning, I worked as a janitor in my father's shop, sweeping up razor-sharp curls of steel and washing windows pitted by white-hot specks of metal thrown off as sparks from the spot-welding machines. Later I became a welder myself and did that for nearly seven years. When I began writing novels for a living in the early 90's, I thought that blue-collar existance was over and done with. Then several years later the implosion of the horror market rendered me jobless and I did as I was raised to do. I laced up my steel-toed boots, packed my lunchbox, and returned to the factories where I grew up. In late '96, I got a job as a press operator in an electric motor plant and stood in one spot with my thumbs on the triggers for nearly five years, until Mexico took our work and I was faced with unemployement once again. I drove to Lebanon and found a job at Metokote, first as a painter on the powder-coating line, then later took on the line leader position of the packing team, packaging electro-coated car parts for shipment to bodyshops all over the nation. And I had that position for nearly eight years, until this recent downturn in automotive consumerism.

So you see, I'm not a stranger to unemployment, the same as I am not a stranger to the blue-collar way of life. But with this recent lay-off and my imersion in my writing, I almost fear losing this sense of blue collar I grew up observing and participating in. If you've read my work, you know that most of my characters are cast from the working class; factory workers, farmers, mechanics, storekeepers, etc... the salt of the earth, as they were once called. And, due to being around such folks all of my life, I believe I can write those characters convincingly. But to do so, I must keep in touch with those who punch the clock and eat their lunches amid the smell of oil, metal, and gasoline fumes. That is why I don't mind going back for those five hours and rubbing elbows with the sort of folks who live from paycheck to paycheck and grumble about the lastest production manager as if he were Satan himself. For it is their essence that go into the men and women of my stories and novels, not some made-up paperdoll of a character that I know absolutely nothing about. In some sense, most of my characters (particularly the main characters) are me... the Jeb Sweenys and the Boyd Andrews. They are constructed from my experiences as a child and as a man; infusing them with their joys and sorrows, their aspirations and angsts.

So, do I complain about breaking away from my most recent domestic routine? A routine that is filled with playing kids, grass-mowing at mid-day, and hours of creating Southern-fried horror behind the keyboard? No, I don't mind at all. If only for a mere five hours, I get to return to a place I feel comfortable with and to spend a little time with people I care about and who care about me in return. I relish hearing their bitching and moaning, as well as their lame jokes (most of them dirty to the point of being pornographic), for that is what keeps me grounded in their world... and keeps me writing my characters the way they ought to be... constructed of flesh and bone, piss and vinegar... instead of unconvincing shadow puppets constucted of random words on cheap pulp paper.

Tuesday, May 19, 2009

The Sick Stuff... SOLD OUT!

According to Paul Goblirch at Thunderstorm Books, my mini-collection of extreme horror tales, THE SICK STUFF, is now officially SOLD OUT, a mere week following its release.


I'd like to thank you all for your interest and support, and for shelling out your hard-earned bucks for that nasty little book with the dead feet on the cover. A special thanks to the following folks: Zach McCain for the gruesome artwork on the cover and the signature page of the hardcover edition (this book is dedicated to you, hoss!), James Newman for writing a wonderful foreward and generating a renewed interest in my novel FEAR, Paul Little for his article "Collecting Ronald Kelly" in the HC, and to David Barnett of Fat Cat Design for the unique design and layout. But most of all to Paul for making the publishing process of TSS a very informative and enjoyable one, without a speck of stress or uncertainty (something I can't say about all my publishing experiences!) This was my first time out with Thunderstorm, but if it's up to me, it certainly won't be my last.


For those who missed out on ordering THE SICK STUFF, I will have copies at Hypericon on June 5th through 7th, so stop on by the signing table and pick yourself up one, along with a complimentary SICK STUFF barf bag (you may need it!).


I've got alot more Southern-fried horror coming at you during the next few months (from Cemetery Dance, Apex, Full Moon, etc.), so keep your eyeballs peeled for upcoming details...

Friday, May 8, 2009

The Sick Stuff Now Shipping!



According to Paul Goblirch at Thunderstorm Books, the softcover edition of The Sick Stuff has arrived from the printer and is now ready for shipping!

The Sick Stuff is a mini collection of seven extreme horror tales that I wrote way back during the splatterpunk era of the early nineties. It contains three previously published stories (Diary, Housewarming, and Old Hacker) as well as four tales never before seen in print (Mass Appeal, Pins & Needles, The Abduction, and Mojo Mama). The softcover edition features an introduction by James Newman and cover art by Zach McCain. The Sick Stuff is #2 in Thunderstorm's Elemental Series, Nate Southerd's Just Like Hell being the first. The Elemental Series is in a small, digest-type format that would easily fit in your hip pocket or in the palm of your hand. The Sick Stuff may be small in stature, but it packs a whallop at 140 pages, each and every one dripping with depraved and disgusting delight.

The hardcover edition of The Sick Stuff, alas, was sold out several days following its announcement, so it is no longer available. It features several extras for the discerning collector, including a special creepy-crawly signature page by Zach and a special article by Paul Little of Full Moon Press titled "Collecting Ronald Kelly".

Paul expects the softcover of TSS to sell out fast, so if you haven't already ordered your copy, now would be a good time to do so. You can order directly from the publisher at http://www.thunderstormbooks.com/ or from two other sources: Horror Mall at http://www.horror-mall.com/ and Cemetery Dance at http://www.cemeterydance.com/.

WARNING!: This tiny little book contains work that's a mite stronger and much more disgusting than Ol' Ron's normal Southern-Fried fare, so keep that in mind. I'm still the same down-home, good-natured fella... I just like to get down and dirty with the rest of 'em sometimes. Hope you enjoy it!

Monday, May 4, 2009

Hypericon 5



Hypericon 5, a very popular convention of "speculative fiction" down here in the middle Tennessee area, will be taking place on June 5th through 7th in Nashville. The genres of horror, science fiction, and fantasy all pretty much share the bill here, but there seems to be an overwhelming line-up of strictly horror authors and artists scheduled this year. I urge all of you who can possibly attend this event to do so, since it is a terrific way to meet your favorite folks in the horror genre, be it writers, artists, or small press publishers.

Brian Keene will be the Author Guest of Honor this year, along with the talented Steven Gilberts as Artist Guest of Honor. Other guests include: Bryan Smith, Scott Nicholson, Deborath LeBlanc, Steven Shrewsbury, Maurice Broaddus, Wrath James White, Matthew Warner, Alex McVey, Deena Warner, and others. Of course, I'll be there, too, as I have for the past couple of years. I'll be on several horror and writing related panels, and will be having a couple of book signings as well. I'll have plenty of copies of Midnight Grinding and Other Twilight Terrors and The Sick Stuff on hand, as well as a few rare copies of Flesh Welder in case you didn't have a chance of picking up a copy back in 2008. Also I'll be bringing Alex McVey's original cover painting of Hell Hollow for all to see.

Hypericon 5 is taking place at the Days Inn Stadium and rooms are still available at a very reasonable rate. Registration for the entire weekend is a mere $35. Believe me, if you can possibly make it, it would be well worth your while. For more information, check out www.hypericon.info. Hope to see you there!