The Arabian Campaign
In the exploration of an ancient Arabian city, Frank Zylka stirs up a hornet’s nest, and struggles to contain the damage.
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The Chronicles of
Chester Fritz
Novel Cover Concept Art
I’ve been playing around with a couple ideas for book cover art. The library itself remains central to all of the designs I’ve tried out. At the moment my favorite is a simple black and white ink sketch. As always, feedback is welcome and all designs are subject to change.
The Soviet Files
Unsure where to begin a search for occult threats, Jim Galgadet tracks down a former colleague Wassily Petrov, who defected from the Soviet Union. What he finds in the Soviet files evokes first curiosity and then sanity bending horror.
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The Postmortem
Marching orders are handed down to a group of university professors after a near disastrous attack on the university library: go on offense, hunt down and fight back against occult forces that have endangered their community. The Ultimatum is the first in a 12 part series that follows the Chester Fritz professors as they battle across four continents with necromantic cultists, dark gods, and sadistic monsters.
If you enjoy the story, consider reading an excerpt from the novel, The Legacy of Chester Fritz, which describes The Battle of the Chester Fritz Library as told by Norm Rolliins.
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The Legend of the Scholomance
As I’ve dug into the occult history of Romania, I’ve become fascinated by the legend of the Scholomance and surprised that the Scholomance has not become more widely incorporated into fiction. The Scholomance , for those who have not read Bram Stoker’s Dracula is the devil’s school in which students descend into darkness for a full year while they learn the dark arts that allow them to bind dragons to their will and control the weather itself.
The Diary of Chester Fritz and the Boy God
The kernel for the Chronicles of Chester Fritz was reading Fritz’s travel diary, which he published later in life as China Journey. The book is a fascinating read in its own right. I’ve re-written the events described in Fritz’s diary as one part of a novel. I’ve also introduced a traveling companion, Bellamy, who is the primary vehicle for my own story.
The Yellow Sign
Several of the stories I’ve written reference the Yellow Sign. This is something from Chambers’ classic story “The Repairer of Reputations” in the King in Yellow. The sign is associated with followers of the Hastur’s avatars and features prominently in the Yellow Mythos.
The Yellow Mythos
So there has long been a connection between the Lovecraft’s Cthuluh Mythos and the Yellow Mythos based on Robert W. Chambers’ The King in Yellow.
No Work, or Odd Jobs?
So for the past couple weeks I have been completely swamped with work and with home schooling children in the midst of a massive pandemic. Thus, my writing has pretty much ground to a halt. All the same, I’ve been devouring a really fun Lovecraft-adjacent series by Heide Goody and Iain Grant: Oddjobs
Sword Fighting (Faking Competence)
I’ve been working on a short story in which learning to fight with a rapier (or more specifically a sword cane) is central to the plot. Unfortunately, I don’t know anything about sword fighting or martial arts of any kind…which makes writing a semi-plausible scene difficult.