New Ronald Kelly Story

Ron Kelly's daughter Reilly is going on a People-to-People Student Ambassador trip to Europe this summer, and Ron is using his skill in an unique fundraising capacity. He has written a new short story "Beneath the Bed" which will only be available for donors. The story will be signed, dated, and numbered, and will include original artwork, and is limited to only 250 copies. The story will be "retired" after this, so this is the only way to read it.

Ron is requesting a donation of just $10, plus $3 for shipping and handling. Payment made be made through Paypal to Ron's email address, dixiedarkun@yahoo. You may also mail a check or money order to: Ronald Kelly, 25 Cherry Circle, Brush Creek, TN 38547. Sounds like a winner!
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Fear & Undertaker's Moon

After much anticipation, the first two volumes in The Essential Ronald Kelly Collection are available from Thunderstorm Books. The series will feature all eight of Ron’s books published by Zebra in the early 90s, with beautiful covers by Alex McVey, and each will feature a new novella by Ron set in the world of that particular novel, as well as a “writing of” feature which will delve into the circumstances behind writing the book. The first two titles to be released are UNDERTAKER’S MOON and FEAR. I’ve read both in previous editions, and they are horror classics, with a lot of people considering FEAR to be the definitive Ronald Kelly novel.
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Two New Collections From Ronald Kelly

Ronald Kelly has announced two new collections of his Southern-fried horror stories. They are Twilight Hankerings and Unhinged, both available from Crossroads Press for the low, low price of $3.99. I know I have a hankerin’ for these stories, and I imagine they would please you, too. Click on the names to be taken to the ordering page.
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New Ronald Kelly Digital Collection

Crossroad Press has released a new Ronald Kelly short story collection in digital format. It is called Dark Dixie II: Tales of Southern Horror, and you can order it at their website. As a special offer, you can get it and the digital version of Hell Hollow for just $6.99. That's too great a deal to pass up!
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Ronald Kelly's 3rd Annual Halloween Contest

Each year, author Ronald Kelly holds a Halloween contest on his website. This year, the prizes are particularly good: 3 personally inscribed Ronald Kelly werewolf stories, a large Alex McVey print, the Universal Wolfman Legacy collection, and best of all, the forthcoming reissue of Ron's werewolf novel Undertaker's Moon. Head on over to ronaldkelly.com and get registered!

In more Ronald Kelly news, his most recent novel Hell's Hollow is now available in e-book form for the bargain price of $4.99. If the recent edition was beyond your budget, or you simply prefer the convenience of the e-format, head over to Crossroads Press to download it.
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Hell Hollow Now Shipping

Hell Hollow, the eagerly-awaited novel from Southern horror author Ronald Kelly is now shipping from Cemetery Dance. Click on the title of the book to see what I thought of it, and on the CD link to order your own copy. This is a highly recommended novel from one of the master horror writers.
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New Ronald Kelly Novel - Timber Gray

Any new of a new Ron Kelly release is good news, and Macabre Ink is now offering his new novel Timber Gray as a digital download in the various popular formats. This is the first time Ron has written a novel in the Western genre, and from the description, I’d say it is western enough to please western fans, while being dark enough to satisfy the horror audiences. You can read more about it and order it by clicking on this site, the Crossroads Press web presence. Cool cover, too.
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My Favorite Horror Book of the Year

So Paul Tremblay issues this challenge to blog, tweet, facebook, or skywrite about your favorite horror book. I ignore such challenges. Except when he’s giving away free stuff, like in this case, and I willingly give up and play along. Plus Paul is the author of the excellent book The Little Sleep. (Note to those fans of The Little Sleep who e-mailed me. That is a positive review. I don’t understand why you would think otherwise.)

Picking my favorite was harder. Fortunately I have this blog to review the books I’ve read this year, but picking the best one wasn’t easy. I’m not going to fall into the whining “Books aren’t good anymore” because I enjoy most of what I read, but it was hard to pick a standout horror book one that was head and shoulders above the rest. At least, until I got back to March and realized Ronald Kelly’s Midnight Grinding and Other Twilight Terrors was published this year. It is a massive collection of Ron’s short work from Cemetery Dance, and filled with some of the best southern-fried writing you’ll ever come across. (His shorter collection The Sick Stuff was a contender, too, but I went with the longer, more diverse volume. A hard call, though.)

So there you have it.
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Tanglewood

On a slow day, reprinting something from an earlier blog:

A couple of years back, Ronald Kelly (The Sick Stuff, Midnight Grinding & Other Twilight Terrors, Hell Hollow) began a triumphant return to horror after too long an absence, and Tanglewood was his first new material in some years. It is a short chapbook (about twenty pages) produced by Cemetery Dance, nicely executed, and well worth seeking out. Due to its brevity, I can't go into too much depth about the story without giving away important plot points, but Tanglewood is a nice, creepy little story about a guy who takes the wrong shortcut, and finds mystery and terror, and how he deals with it. One more bit of Kelly's work to whet the appetite while waiting for the forthcoming reprinting of his earlier work.
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Halloween Contest!

Ronald Kelly has his annual Halloween contest up at his site www.ronaldkelly.com. This year, there are three prizes, all connected to Ron's great new novel Hell Hollow. Signing up is easy and the prizes are cool, so click on the link and head over there.
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Hell Hollow

Coming of age stories have always been big in the horror genre. Stephen King’s It, Robert R. McCammon’s Boy’s Life, and Dan Simmons’ Summer of Night are just a few of the classics that have explored this theme. Ronald Kelly’s next book, Hell Hollow, fits into this sub-category, and it holds its own quite nicely against the aforementioned books.

Ninety years ago, terrible things happened in rural Hawkshaw County, Tennessee, near the Town of Harmony. An evil man named Augustus Leech came to the community, selling quack medicine that purported to cure ills, but instead, poisoned twelve small children. The adults of Harmony took their revenge on Leech, and since, his bones have lain in the supposedly haunted area called Hell Hollow. But evil doesn’t die easily, and a killer on the run from the law will intersect with those remains to bring old horror anew to Harmony.

The book focuses on four kids, Keith McLeod from Atlanta, forced to spend the summer with his (in his mind) bumpkin grandfather (who had his own encounter with Leech when he was a child), his cousin Rusty, Maggie, and their wheelchair-bound friend Chuck. In a summer of discovery, they, and a rape victim named Alison set on revenge, will be the only ones who can stop Leech and save Harmony.

Since the horror boom of the eighties, a lot of writers have forgotten a basic rule: If you don’t develop your characters and bring them to life, readers won’t care what happens to them. Too many authors have gone for gore over substance, and as a result, a lot of modern books seem inconsequential. If you don’t care whether a character lives or dies, it doesn’t matter how gory his death scene is written.

Ronald Kelly (The Sick Stuff, Midnight Grinding, Fleshwelder) is old school, and I mean that with the highest possible praise. Although his writing does deliver the shocks, as seen in his popular collection The Sick Stuff as well as this novel, he takes the time to let us get to know Alison, the four kids, Keith’s grandfather, and others, so by the time we get to the climax of the story, their struggles have meaning for us. Kelly also does a great job capturing the rhythms of rural Southern life.

Coming in at around 500 pages, this is a long novel, but it doesn’t read like one. When I became too busy to read after I received this, I took a day’s annual leave to finish it up. Hell Hollow is slated for an October or November release from Cemetery Dance Publications, and I can’t recommend it enough. You can pre-order it by clicking here. I’m looking forward to receiving the official release from Cemetery Dance to read it again. The beautiful cover artwork is by Alex McVey.

A note to readers from a more urban setting, or maybe just for those from outside the South: It may seem strange that a rural Bible-Belt Southern town would have an area called Hell Hollow, but it’s not. I grew up in an extremely rural part of Alabama, and we had local sections called Hellacious Acres (a cool name, I think) and our own Creepy Hollow, where an old bridge spanned a narrow creek in a place where heavy forest growth cut out all light, and strange noises were heard in the dark. It was traditional for us to take dates to Creepy Hollow, park on the bridge (it got no traffic to speak of), then “discover” our cars would mysteriously refuse to start once our date reached the point where she demanded we leave the scary place. Hey, if you’re not good looking enough to make them cling to you, scaring them can work in a pinch.
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Good Sick News

According to reports, Ron Kelly’s super short story collection The Sick Stuff is now sold out in both paperback and hardcover editions. Many congratulations to Ron and to Thunderstorm Books for this. I have heard a lot of comments about The Sick Stuff in various venues, and they are all positive. People who have never read anything by Ron Kelly are raving about this. So if you didn’t follow my advice and order The Sick Stuff when it came out, you need to start scrounging dealers to find someone who might have an overlooked copy. And in the future remember this rule: I am always right.*


*Margin of error on this statement is +-50%.

The Sick Stuff

When I heard Ronald Kelly was going to release a collection of his more “extreme” horror stories, I’ll admit I was a little skeptical. Kelly’s work has been more the atmospheric horror than the gross-out contest type, and despite the sometimes fractious nature of the horror community, you won’t ever hear anyone say an unkind word about him, and there is difficulty imaging a very nice person writing hardcore stomach-churning stuff. Maybe I should be more wary of nice people, because Thunderstorm Books’ edition of The Sick Stuff proves Kelly can more than hold his own against the Edward Lees, Skipp & Spectors and the like.

Back in the late eighties, a new trend emerged in horror called splatterpunk, in which authors pushed the boundaries of what had been acceptable, and their stories became steadily more extreme. In the long run, this was bad for the genre, as too many writers focused on topping one another at the expense of a well written story. The good writers in this trend, Skipp & Spector, David Schow, et al, ended up somewhat drowned out by a sea of exploitation writers. But for a brief time, this sort of story was what editors wanted, and it was against that backdrop that Kelly wrote most of what is contained here.

It’s always difficult to go into too much detail about short stories without giving too much away, but I’m going to hit the high points of them. My favorite is probably the lead story, “Diary”, in which a serial killer writes his life story prior to execution, including the observation that the babysitters had barbecued the wrong twin. One that will stick with a lot of people is “The Abduction”. It’s a story that will require you to pay attention and think a little at the end to get the thrust of the story, and then you’ll want to instantly re-read it. “Housewarming” should keep anyone with a phobia about spiders from sleeping with the lights off for a long time.

There are seven stories in all, presented in an affordable, smaller-than-usual paperback format. This is another side of Ronald Kelly than we are used to seeing, but he brings the same level of talent to these stories, all of which are keepers. The book includes an introduction by the talented young writer James Newman, artwork by Zach McCain, and an afterword by Kelly where he talks about the inspiration and the history of the stories, something I always find fascinating.

If you are a fan of Edward Lee or any of the other writers known for walking close to the edge with their fiction, you should check The Sick Stuff out, because you would like it. If you are not already a fan of Ronald Kelly, you should be, and this would be a good place to start. It is priced very affordably, so it won’t strain your budget, and there are only going to be 250 copies, so you should grab one soon. You can order the book through the website of Thunderstorm Books, and it is also available through The Horror Mall and Cemetery Dance. Mention my name, and they’ll sell it to you at the regular price. ;-)

Midnight Grinding & Other Twilight Terrors

Midnight Grinding & Other Twilight Terrors is horror author Ronald Kelly’s first collection of short stories, and it is a frustrating book. Frustrating because you are torn between wanting to save these stories to read one at a time and make them last, and wanting to read it all at one sitting. I read it fairly quickly, then regretted I didn’t draw them out to make them last a little longer.

Up front, let me tell you I have a strong affinity for Kelly’s work. Ron and I are of the same approximate generation, I guess. While he was growing up in rural Tennessee, I was doing so in rural west Alabama, in a similar Southern community of Scot-Irish Protestants. I imagine if we’d known each other as boys, we’d have traded copies of Famous Monsters of Filmland. I’m sure there are things we would disagree on, but Ron’s South is the same as my South, so the characters that inhabit his stories seem familiar and real to me. I also believe the Southern story-telling tradition is hard to beat.

I’ve already talked about the circumstances of Ron’s return to writing, so I won’t belabor that again, but I will say this represents the first of his return in 2009 to the field, and I think he will be making a big splash. This, as I said, is his first big collection, and Cemetery Dance has done a great job, from the Alex McVey cover art to Kathleen Freeman’s very pleasing interior design. For those who see page count as an indication of value, it clocks in at over 400 pages, and contains (unless I miscounted) 32 stories, originally published between 1988 and 1992. Each story is approximately 20 pages in length, so if you can refrain from reading the whole thing at once, it would be nice for lunch and other breaks.

The stories are of consistently high quality. Being an audience for well-spun tales goes way back into our makeup, and Ron has a gift for this. Most collections are tremendously uneven, for obvious reason, but there wasn’t a story here that I didn’t like, a rare thing for me, since I’ve been accused of hating everything by a devoted reader.

It’s hard to pick out a favorite, but here are some highlights: A traveler makes a mistake when he gets off at “Exit 85”…a swamp version of Creature From the Black Lagoon in “Beneath Black Bayou”…the Universal Monsters win out in “Thinning The Herd”…the O. Henryish “Breakfast Serial”…antebellum lycanthropy in “Oh, Sordid Shame!”…John Steinbeck does vampires in “The Boxcar”…and assorted other ghoulies, ghosties, long-legged beasties, and monsters in human form. A number of them were familiar to me once I started them, having read them in their original published venue. This is definitely the book to beat for best collection of 2009.

Ron’s one of the nicest guys in the business, but he pulls no punches when he’s writing. These tales would chill your blood told around a campfire, and are long past due in being collected. Few people today are writing this kind of straight ahead old-school horror. There is also a good bit of wry humor, which has long been an integral part of horror fiction. Consider this a retrospective of the first part of Ronald Kelly’s career, and a teaser for what is to come. But for whatever reason, hie thee to Cemetery Dance and purchase this book now.

As a purely irrelevant, but nostalgic note: I’m the kind of person who reads the publishing history at the front of a book (and the liner notes on albums/CDs), and it is sobering how many of the publications that first hosted these stories no longer exist.
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Somewhere South of Hell

A lot of changes in the marketplace have made it difficult to put together top-notch horror anthologies. The days when Dark Forces, Prime Evil, etc. propelled the genre seem to be in the distant past. This may be about to change, as what looks like the best horror anthology in twenty years has been announced.

Ronald Kelly has announced he is editing Somewhere South of Hell: An Anthology of Southern-Fried Horror. The subject matter is near and dear to my heart, but look at the lineup: Joe R. Lansdale, Brian Keene, Alan M. Clark, Alex McVey, James Newman, Deborah LeBlanc, Scott Nicholson, Bryan Smith, Elizabeth Massie, Stephen Mark Rainey, Bev Vincent, Nate Southard, Jason Brannon, John Hornor Jacobs, Mari Adkins, Joan Turner, Randy Fox, Mark Justice, Donn Gash, Ronald Kelly.

Wow. That is an impressive amount of firepower. There may be more to come, but that is already a knockout list. The anthology should be published in mid-2010. For more information, go to Ronald Kelly’s blog, and watch for updates.

The Return of Ronald Kelly

Back at the tail end of the horror boom, Ronald Kelly emerged as one of the very best writers in the genre, and probably the most Southern horror writer working. The collapse of horror publishing derailed his momentum before he became a household word, most if not all his work passed out of print, and Ron pretty much stopped writing for a number of years. This was a big loss to the genre and to you personally, if you didn’t have an opportunity to read his work the first time around.

At a time when most of the news, whether you’re talking about horror writing or the world in general, is bad, here is some positive words for you: Ronald Kelly is back. For the last year or so, he has become more visible in the field publishing a couple of chapbooks and giving a great reading at Hypericon. 2009 could well be the year of Ronald Kelly, since Full Moon Press has made the wise decision to reprint his early novels in deluxe hard covers, packaged as the Essential Ronald Kelly collection. There will be nine of these reprints, starting with Undertaker’s Moon and ending with Blood Kin. The new editions will come with an additional novella and the back-story on the book. These nine not-to-be-missed books will be paving the way for brand new material from Mr. Kelly. I don’t think there has ever been reprints I’ve been as excited about, and if you’re a horror fan (you’re reading a blog with the unimaginative but unmistakable title of Dead in the South; either you are a horror fan or you’re lost) you won’t want to miss any of these.

More information about the books can be found at Ronald Kelly’s website, and the books can be ordered through Full Moon Press.

Flesh Welder

The publishing collapse in the horror genre in the mid-90s began hard times for a number of established writers. Some left writing entirely as the markets dried up. Among these was Ronald Kelly, who had published eight novels and numerous short stories, including the classic Fear. Kelly gave up writing for ten years, but has now begun a welcome comeback. Cemetery Dance published his chapbook Tanglewood earlier this year, and now a new publishing house Croatoan Publishing, has kicked off its line with Flesh Welder.

Flesh Welder is a short story, originally published in the relatively obscure Noctulpa back in 1990, and unfamiliar to most. It is a post-apocalyptic tale, taking place in Houston about ten years from now. The city, and probably the world, is in ruins from an unexplained war. The area is covered with radioactive zones, and there is a vicious, guerilla-style war still raging, apparently along ethnic lines.

One of the most important survivors in the area is Doctor Rourke, who has acquired the ability to weld flesh – that is, to replace missing body parts with scavenged meat from the many casualties in the area. With traumatic amputations common due to the nature of the fighting, he is important to all sides. The story concerns what happens when Jeremiah Payne, the most cruel of the commanders, needs his services, a man who Rourke despises.

Flesh Welder is a highly entertaining story, and Croatoan has produced a very handsome book. The cover, by Zach McCain, is striking, and the book includes an extensive interview with Kelly by Mark Hickerson, as well as an excerpt from Kelly’s upcoming novel, Undertaker’s Moon. It’s good to see Kelly return.

The book can be ordered from the publisher by going to http://www.croatoanpublishing.com/. The cost is a fairly incredible $5.00 (including shipping and handling!). At that price, you should give it a try, and quick before they come to their senses. It comes autographed by Kelly and McCain.

Note: Since this review originally appeared on Skullring, Flesh Welder has completely sold out. Congratulations to Ronald Kelly and to Croatoan Publishing.