As you probably know by now, my latest novel, Kill Whitey, has shipped. If your local bookstore doesn’t have it in stock, you can find it right here in our Bookstore. It’s a $25 hardcover. Nicely priced no matter what your budget.

It’s a dark crime thriller, similar to Terminal (indeed, at one point, I thought it would be Terminal’s follow-up), but has the gore level of The Rising and City of the Dead. I think you’ll dig it. Three words: Death By Forklift.

Before the Blog moved here, I’d posted a little essay about the book, and several of you have asked me to re-post it here.

Your wish is my command:

KILL WHITEY: THE LAST BREATH OF THE AMERICAN DREAM, or, WHAT CAN I READ UNTIL GHOST WALK COMES OUT?

(Originally published on Hail Saten, April 2008)

I was watching CNBC last night, and a whole bunch of experts said that America’s current economic recession wasn’t real. Nope. Turns out, according to these middle-aged, suit and tie-wearing, millionaire white guys, that the recession is just a rumor cooked up by the liberal media and Barack Obama.

Then I open the paper this morning and the Harley Davidson plant here in York is laying off 300 people, many of whom are friends or readers.

Central Pennsylvania is no stranger to economic hard times. Decades of union-busting, Reaganomics, NAFTA, and other real-life monsters have left Central Pennsylvania a gutted, desolate wasteland where the only people doing steady business are the unemployment offices. Oh sure, there are jobs to be had. Service jobs at places like Subway and McDonalds and Burger King. And many people work those because they have no choice. But you can’t feed your family on that, especially if you’re an unemployed paper-worker, steel-worker, foundry-worker, etc. who was used to earning a decent wage. Our manufacturing sector is a shadow of its former self, and it ain’t coming back.

And that is what Kill Whitey is really about. Okay, yes, on the surface it’s about a group of Central Pennsylvanian dockworkers who run afoul of the Russian mob and find themselves trying to kill an enemy who, quite simply, won’t fucking die. They shoot him, stab him, impale him on a forklift, and crush him with a soda machine, but he keeps coming back for more. This guy makes Jason Voorhees look like a yip-dog.

Much of the book takes place in an abandoned industrial park—a ghost town of factories and warehouses, left crumbling because all the jobs have shipped overseas to places like China, Russia, and India. It’s no accident that I set the book there, nor is it an accident that the antagonists represent an economic invasion and change in the status quo due to foreign interference. And it pleases me very much that, so far, the critics seem to have picked up on that. But the book’s underlying metaphor is about much more than that. It’s about empire and democratic imperialism and living in the age of the War On Terror and the very real death of the American Dream (which I am convinced we Generation X’ers are experiencing).

Oh, and it’s violent and gory as all hell. Seriously. It makes City of the Dead read like a Disney cartoon.

Kill Whitey is probably the darkest, grittiest, most brutal and cynical thing I’ve written yet. If you enjoyed Terminal, you’ll love this. I guarantee it. And that’s a good thing, because I see my writing starting to slant more and more in this direction. That’s called growth, and it’s a good thing for a writer.

So, never mind what the middle-aged, rich white guys on CNBC say. Listen to this middle-aged, blue-collar, libertarian-leaning, horror writing, capitalistic white guy—when it comes to the economy right now, shit is fucked. I know this, and so do my peers. Book sales are down, quite simply, because there is no money leftover for books after buying gas and food.

That being said, I hope you’ll buy Kill Whitey. It’s my first trade hardcover (and there are no plans for a paperback at this time). It only costs $25. And I’m very, very proud of it. The book ships to bookstores next week, however, unlike my paperbacks, your local bookstore might not have it in stock. You can ask them to order one for you. Give them the title, my name and this ISBN: 978-1-58767-178-4.

If you don’t have a bookstore near you, or your bookstore doesn’t have Kill Whitey in stock and you don’t want to wait for them to order it, you can buy it online from the publisher, the Horror Mall, or Amazon.com (as well as indie booksellers like Camelot Books).

I appreciate your business, especially during these hard times. I hope that the book helps you forget about bills and stuff for a while, and that you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.