Hello! All week we’ve been sharing the covers for my first three novels, which are returning to print after several years of being completely unavailable. We are reprinting them through Ghoulish Books and giving them a brand-new life and I am very stoked about that. If you missed it, click HERE for the post about Toxicity, and click HERE for the post about The Mind is a Razorblade.
Today, we’re talking about my third novel: How to Successfully Kidnap Strangers.
Behold, Betty Rocksteady’s NSFW cover art, which will surely get me in trouble on any social media account I decide to share this on:
1. Do not respond to bad reviews.
2. If you must respond to bad reviews, please do not kidnap the reviewer.
3. If you must kidnap the reviewer, do not kidnap him in a public area.
4. If there are witnesses, do not also kidnap them.
5. If you also kidnap the witnesses, consider quitting crystal meth.
6. If you find yourself surrounded by hostages, purchase extra duct tape.
7. Do not let the hostages take their own hostages.
8. Invest in better coffee.
9. Don’t forget: dildo crucifixes have more than one use.
10. And, most importantly: do not engage the severed heads in conversation.
If my memory is correct, I wrote the majority of this novel while sitting shotgun on a road trip to Corpus Christi, typing into an Alphasmart delicately balanced atop my lap. It is the fastest I’ve ever written a book. I regret the length of the title. I gave serious consideration into omitting “Successfully” from the reprinted edition, but feared confusing the algorithms and not being able to merge it into pre-existing Goodreads/Amazon pages made for the first edition back in 2015 when it was published by Bizarro Pulp Press.
I wrote How to Successfully Kidnap Strangers after a couple years of operating my own indie press and being around other indies. It’s part crime novel and part satire of the indie press scene (at least, what the indie press scene was like in 2014). It’s about a bizarro indie writer who kidnaps a blogger who’s recently given him a terrible review. Given recent Goodreads drama that’s taken the internet by storm, I’ve very interested to see how this book hits for people now. I still think it’s pretty funny and hope its new readers find it entertaining.
At the moment, Strangers can only be pre-ordered through the GHOULISH.RIP webstore. I will be signing & personalizing all paperback pre-orders (unless requested not to via the customer notes). Pre-order HERE.
But also, if you’d rather scoop up all three novels (Toxicity, The Mind is a Razorblade, and How to Successfully Kidnap Strangers), we are offering a discounted paperback bundle for ghouls to pre-order instead. All three books will release at the same time, and I’ll also still sign & personalize them.
Pre-order the bundle HERE.
And, since someone asked, I want to make it clear these three books are very much standalone novels. Their only connection is I wrote all three of them, they were released relatively close together, and they have been out of print for several years.
Note: These three novels will not be included on any Ghoulish membership subscriptions.
