The Author and the Scream Queen

By Rory Black

Passions burn bright at a horror convention...

Scare-a-Thon Santa Clara, a Bay Area horror convention, where a B-movie actor holds court in the bar, and novelist J. Ellis Briggs drinks alone.

Ellis leaves the bar early and walks straight into a leather clad beauty. Half-goddess, half-succubus.

Horror movie queen Tiffany Rochon.

The Author and the Scream Queen, a hot, sexy tale of blossoming love between a bookworm and a beauty. From Rory Black, author of The Kinky Neighbor, Lover by Proxy, and Taken!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rory Black
• Release date: Jan 15, 2018
• ISBN: 9781370546350

Rory Black

Under the name 'Rory Black' Michael D George is the author of the wildly-popular Iron Eyes westerns, coming from PP very, very soon! Writes Michael: "In my time I've done a lot of things. I've been a barber, a freelance commercial artist, a portrait painter, a grave stone designer (a dying trade), an animator and an author. I did spend a few years in the Merchant Navy and was lucky to have travelled around the world four times before I was 23. I spent a lot of time in America during those days and cruised for two summers between California and Alaska. Now it is forty years later and these days I spend most of my time writing novels under my own name and no less than seven pseudonyms. I've been lucky to number a few of my old cowboy heroes as friends, and my walls are covered in the photographs of several of my cowboy hero pals. Ive written a lot of books and have plenty more stories still to tell. As one of those friends, the late, legendary Monte Hale used to tell me, 'Shoot low -- they might be crawling!'"

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The Author and the Scream Queen

The Author and the Scream Queen

Rory Black

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Also by Rory Black

I was a novelist surrounded by movie lovers.

Some places, that might have given me cred. People might have cared how many movies were made out of novels every year. Heck, one of those movies had been mine, a horror novel titled The Hand in the Grass.

But here at Scare-a-Thon Santa Clara, nobody cared about that book. This was a horror convention with a good thousand total guests, and if any of them had heard of the book, I’d have been shocked.

But all of them had seen the film, of course. You probably saw it too. The film was called Red Machete, taking the title entirely from exactly one moment in the whole story. Not even from a key scene, which was where the title of the novel came from. All of the events of the story started because the heroine, Shawna Rollins, saw that hand in the grass.

The Hollywood people said that their title was sexier. Sexier. A machete, red with blood, was somehow supposed to be sexy. Says something about the mindset of those people.

On the other hand, clearly those people knew something that I didn’t. The movie – made for only one million dollars -- took in some twenty times its budget. Meanwhile, the book died in relative obscurity. And I couldn’t even complain about it too much, because I did get my payday from the film.

But here I was, hanging out in the bar at the convention, and I attracted less attention than the wait staff. A mere writer, when everyone wanted to talk to the important people – the movie stars.

The bar was open on two sides, so that everyone could see all the people packed inside. Probably hoping that passersby would long to join the fun and spend even more money on overpriced drinks.

Or maybe I was just a little bitter about buying my own drinks still. I knew a fantasy writer who didn’t sell any better than I did, but who never had to buy his own drinks at conventions because the fans all loved him.

Or maybe I was just going to the wrong conventions. I stuck to the local ones instead of going to World Horror Con, where I heard that the writers fared better.

Anyway, there was a long, curving stretch of dark hardwood bar in front of a mirror wall on which were some thousand and one bottles