Border Town Blood

Book excerpt: Border Town Blood is a contemporary horror novel in three acts. "But I'm not really into horror," you may say. Well, Border Town Blood is like an excellent submarine sandwich (or a po' boy for my friends in the Deep South); there is something in it for everyone: horror, fantasy, romance, inspiration and even a little comic relief tossed in for good measure. Border Town Blood is set in a geographically accurate Fort Smith. I have always believed that fear thrives on the familiar. Television programs like The Twilight Zone were much more frightening and disturbing for their real world setting. Sure having a homicidal alien chasing someone around a spaceship is scary; but having a horde of zombies rise from the cemetery you drive past every day at dusk is terrifying! In Border Town Blood, I have taken great pains to describe local geography and local businesses exactly where they are. To paraphrase the great American storyteller Louis L'Amour, if I tell you there's a water hole somewhere, if you follow my directions, you will end up with a cool drink. Of course, it has been necessary to fictionalize most of the names of the businesses and people, but there is still a barbecue place where Nealson's stands, a record storage business where Centralized Record Storage stands and, as of January 2009, the Mallalieu Church still stands right where Ellis left it. I am confident that Mayor Ray Baker would love to have the fans of Border Town Blood visit Fort Smith and spend a day or two driving around on a Border Town Blood tour. Border Town Blood is based on actual historic events and authentic Native American mythology. Many of today's most successful television programs brag that their stories are "ripped from the headlines." Border Town Blood takes that premise and stands it on its head. The stories in Border Town Blood are ripped from the history books. The Trail of Tears is one of the most shameful events in our country's history. The carnival atmosphere of the public hangings in 19th Century Fort Smith were probably more raucous than I portray them. The multiple waves of refugees and displaced persons referenced by Alice Harvey were actual events. In the forties, Camp Chaffee was a German prisoner of war camp. Fort Chaffee was the Middle American staging ground for fifty-one thousand Hmong, Indochinese, and Vietnamese men, women and children in the seventies; and in the eighties over twenty-five thousand Cuban refugees passed through Fort Smith. Over ten thousand refugees from Hurricane Katrina were housed in Fort Chaffee in 2005. What is so special about Fort Smith that, time and again, the disenfranchised and the footloose end up here? Border Town Blood poses an answer to that and many other questions. Native American mythology is a rich and largely untapped seedbed of tales and legends. Border Town Blood borrows a few of these myths and weaves them into a tapestry that is rooted in history and flies high in the firmament of modern imagination. Tsul Kalu and Jumlin are genuine figures in Native American pantheons. Shapeshifters, dreamwalkers and warriors mighty enough to slay gods are part and parcel of Native American oral tradition. Border Town Blood tells its story through the eyes of those experiencing the action. Unlike the bird's eye view of many third-person novels or the solo inside-out view of a first-person narrative, Border Town Blood puts you the reader inside the heads and hearts of the stories' characters. You get to know the characters, their feelings and their motivations through their own eyes: unvarn