A small surprise about my horror novella, The Tunnels

I've noticed a strange phenomenom about the horror novellas I have up on Amazon's Kindle store for sale in both the United States and the United Kingdom. The Tunnels, a horror tale that takes place in 1968 Vietnam and deals with a U.S. Army tunnel rat, is out-selling my other three novellas by three to one. Though the stories are only selling a few dozen copies each month, The Tunnels seems to be way ahead of the others.

I honestly expected The Encounter to be the leader of the pack, followed by Dark Night of the Soul. The Encounter, a modern-day horror story about U.S. Army ex-tunnel rat, Ben Freeman, and the creature from his past that has finally returned after four decades to destroy everything he loves and holds dear in his life, was the first story to be written over two-and-a-half years ago. This sucker has gone through at least twenty drafts and total rewrites. In many ways it was because of The Encounter that I wrote The Tunnels a year later. Readers of The Encounter wanted to know about Ben Freeman's experience in 1968 South Vietnam and the thing that massacred his team of tunnel rats in the underground Vietcong complex. I've always felt The Encounter is actually the scariest of the stories because the beginning of it happened to me on a Halloween night when taking my roommate's pit bull out for a walk around the block where we lived. We were followed by someone who I thought was dressed up like a dandy from England in the Eighteen Hundreds. I thought it was a nifty Halloween costume. He followed Betty and I down the main avenue and then down a deserted side street. Now, Betty weighs seventy pounds and is a long nose pit bull with a long tail and long floppy ears. She's a loving dog, but will defend her owner, or the people in her life, to the death if called upon to do so. She is fearless in that respect. That night, however, Betty was scared of the person following us. Because she was scared, I became worried myself. I mean what in the hell could scare a pit bull? When we reached the point of no return, I knew we either had to face the person following us or risk being attacked in the darkness of the street. Most of the street lights were busted. We stopped on the sidewalk about mid-way down and stared back at the person fifty feet away. He had a top hat on, an overcoat designed like those from the Eighteenth Century, and black knee boots. The lapels of the overcoat were drawn up around his face so I couldn't see his features. Since it was cold that night and the wind was blowing, I didn't think much about it at first. Later, my imagination would get the best of me, especially since I had no idea what he looked like. Not being armed at that time, I decided the best course of action was to simply attack first and then see what happened. So, Betty and I started running toward him at a fast pace. I had her on a leash. He stood there just a yard or so from the corner of the intersection, watching us, and then took off running down the sidewalk of Eastern Avenue. By the time we reached the intersection and looked around the corner of the high wall surrounding our condominium complex, he had disappeared from sight. I thought about that for the next few days and gradually came up with the idea for The Encounter.

Also, the ex-Special Forces Captain in the story, Mike Malloy, is based on someone I personally know. Mike was never a Green Beret, but he was in Army Intelligence and then Black Opts for over twelve years. He helped me with some of the technical stuff in The Encounter, and I used him as one of the main characters and then again in The Tunnels.

Strange as it may seem, it would be another year before I found out who the person on that eventful Halloween night was and why he'd been following Betty and I. That, unfortunately, took the mystery out of the whole experience and made me and my roommate laugh. Still, feeling that both stories would make great horror movies, I decided to write a screenplay that was based on each novella. I sent the script of The Encounter to Ed Harris last year. I wrote the movie with him in mind as tunnel rat Ben Freeman and his actual wife, Amy Madigan, as Freeman's wife, Sheila. I could see Ed Harris going face to face against something totally evil and nearly indestructible to get revenge for the deaths of his loved ones, not caring if he lived or died. To be honest, I could also see Ed directing the movie, too. Though the odds of anything coming from this are greater than winning the California lottery, I still remember a quote from The Shawshank Redemption--"Hope is a good thing, perhaps the best of things, and no good thing ever dies." Well, I'm definitely still hoping something will come of this.

With regards to Dark Night of the Soul, I was coming back on a bus from a Zen center in Nebraska two decades ago. As we entered Utah late at night, the bus pulled over and picked up a stranger on the side of the road. Most everyone on the bus was asleep, except me and a couple of others. The guy who got on the bus had a black cowboy hat on, a duster like the men wore in a Clint Eastwood western, and black cowboys boots. He walked to the back of the bus, and I didn't sleep a wink the rest of the night, wondering who the hell he was and why the driver had stopped to pick him up in the middle of nowhere. I kept thinking to myself, "What if he's a fucking vampire or something. He could kill everyone on the bus during the night before we reached Las Vegas." That thought morphed years later into a full-fledged story about a bus load of passengers being chased by redneck vampires in pickup trucks through the southern part of Utah at night. Only a young man trained in Japanese swordsmanship stood between them and certain death. The premise here was that there was much more to fear in Utah than just the Mormons. This is definitely a story that has the type of violence and high body count like in the movie 30 Days of Night, not the "Twilight" series. If I could draw, I would've turned it into a graphic comic book. I also left the story open-ended so I could write a sequel.

The Cat From Hell is the fourth novella I have up on Amazon. I don't consider it my best story, but a friend of mine would disagree. She and her son love the story. Maybe because it's slightly more realistic in nature. The novella is based on a real black cat that was given to my former roommate by one of her daughters. She got the cat a couple of months after I started renting a room from her. The cat was small and thin, but boy could it scare the bejesus out of you with its eyes. Sometimes I would find the cat simply staring at me, and I would get goose bumps on my arms. The cat even tripped me one night when I was coming down the stairs. It wasn't long before the idea of a story popped into my mind. All I had to do was raise the stakes to a life and death struggle, and intensify the terror aspect. I didn't expect this story to overshadow any of the others.

A couple of ideas about why The Tunnels is selling better than the other three novellas. The first is that I attempted to make the story as realistic as possible and even had former U.S. Army Staff Sergeant Tom Wergen read it. Tom was probably the most famous of the tunnel rats in Vietnam and somehow managed to survive the horrors and ordeals of the underground complexes and the Vietcong soldiers who tried to kill them at every move. Tom gave the story his okay and thanked me for protraying his "rats" so realistically and for giving them the respect that was due. I also originally used retired Colonel Robert Rheault in my story to add authenticity to the last third of it. Colonel Rheault commanded the 5th Special Forces Group in Vietnam before he and several other Green Berets were charged with killing a North Vietnamese double agent. Though the charges were later dropped on orders from President Nixon, I felt Colonel Rheault and his men were treated wrongly by the Army and General Abrams, who had it in for Special Forces. Anyway, I based one of my characters in The Tunnels on Bob Rheault, who isn't about to let some asshole colonel railroad his Green Berets. Bob read the story and liked it. He called me one evening from Maine when I was living with my roommate and offered a few suggestions to make the story more authentic, and then asked that I change his character's name. Bob told me that if people read it who knew him, they might very well believe he did those very things. It's not that he wouldn't have done it to get justice for his men, but rather he didn't want to chance the possible aggravation at this late stage of his life. Bob also told me that he was a big fan of Lee Child and the "Reacher" novels and that my story reminded him of those books. His compliment, along with those from Tom Wergen, mean more to me than anything else in regards to The Tunnels. I promised Tom that if a movie ever got made, he could be a techical consultant on it. Maybe Ed Harris could star in The Encounter and then direct The Tunnels, and Tom could be his consultant on both projects. That would be a dream come true.

So, The Tunnels is selling good, folks, and maybe...just maybe a movie will be done of it in the future. One can only hope.