“You buy it yet?” Franklin asked.
“Got the deed this week. Should have ‘er up ‘n runnin’ real soon. Be all ready for you when you get outta here. Have a nice bunch of sweet honeys all tied up and waitin’ for you.”
Franklin smiled. He’d already done a year of his sentence.
With this to look forward to, the next three would just fly on by.
AFTERWORD by Joe Konrath
In 2007 I wrote a horror novel called AFRAID under the pen name Jack Kilborn, and that landed me a two-book deal. My publishers wanted a book similar in tone to AFRAID, so I pitched them the idea for a book called TRAPPED and wrote the first few thousand words. They placed an excerpt for TRAPPED in the back of copies of AFRAID, hoping to release the book in the winter of 2009.
Unfortunately (for me), my editors hated TRAPPED when they read the whole thing.
Personally, I liked it. The novel was more intense than AFRAID, and probably a little meaner and gorier (maybe more than just a little), but I believed it kept to the same theme and tone of the first Kilborn book. Namely, regular people in a dark, confined setting, confronted with an overpowering, horrible threat.
Since I wanted to get paid, I rewrote TRAPPED according to the editorial notes I’d been given. I don’t believe it made the book better, but it did make it different. I toned down a bit of violence and sex, added a bit more violence in other areas, changed a few characters, cut a sub plot, and wrote a new ending.
My editors hated the new version as well. So I put TRAPPED away, figuring it would find readers eventually, and instead wrote ENDURANCE, the third Jack Kilborn book in my two-book contract. My editors liked ENDURANCE, but wanted me to make some significant cuts. Having been down that road before, I told them no, and I pulled ENDURANCE from publication.
So now I had two intense horror novels, ready to publish. All I had to figure out is what to do with them.
During the 18 months I’d been working on TRAPPED and ENDURANCE, I’d turned some of my older books (written under my real name, J.A. Konrath) into ebooks. To my surprise, they sold like crazy. Rather than pursue traditional print publication, I decided to do it alone and release TRAPPED and ENDURANCE myself.
I like ENDURANCE. So much, that I didn’t want to see it diminished by what I felt were unnecessary edits. Though it isn’t as horrific as TRAPPED (I don’t know if I’ll ever write anything as horrific as TRAPPED ever again) there were certain creepy elements to this book that weirded me out. In fact, the whole reason I wrote this book was because of an idea I had while on vacation.
We were renting a cabin in the woods in northern Wisconsin, and I was sitting on the bed when a disturbing thought hit me. What if the cabin’s owners were watching us, right now?
In fact, if you were a psychotic voyeur, it would be pretty easy to rig your house with hidden passages and peep holes, and then rent it out to unsuspecting guests.
I immediately became paranoid, and looked at the closet, the bathroom, the stairs, wondering if I was being spied on.
Then I heard something creak under the bed.
Could someone actually be under there?
No one actually was. But I kept thinking about awful it would be to stay in someone else’s house and suddenly realize someone was under your bed.
Of course, what could be even worse than that?
Someone under your bed, and you don’t have legs so you can’t run away.
I hope you had as much fun reading ENDURANCE as I had writing it. If you did, I encourage you to check out AFRAID, TRAPPED, and my J.A. Konrath books, which also have some good scares in them.
And if you’d like to see a sequel, email me. I may not listen to my publishers, but I always listen to my readers…
April 13
Chicago, IL
Read the Jack Daniels series by JA Konrath
Whiskey Sour
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Cherry Bomb
Shaken
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55 Proof – Short Story Omnibus
Suckers by JA Konrath and Jeff Strand
Planter's Punch by JA Konrath and Tom Schreck
Floaters by JA Konrath and Henry Perez
SERIAL UNCUT by Blake Crouch and Jack Kilborn
Truck Stop by Jack Kilborn and JA Konrath
Writing as Jack Kilborn
Afraid
Trapped
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The Newbie’s Guide to Publishing
Visit Joe at www.JAKonrath.com
Excerpt from AFRAID by Jack Kilborn
The hunter’s moon, a shade of orange so dark it appeared to be filled with blood, hung fat and low over the mirror surface of Big Lake McDonald. Sal Morton took in a lungful of crisp Wisconsin air, shifted on his seat cushion, and cast his Lucky 13 over the stern. The night of fishing had been uneventful; a few small bass earlier in the evening, half a dozen Northern Pike—none bigger than a pickle—and then, nothing. The zip of his baitcaster unspooling and the plop of the bait hitting the water were the only sounds he’d heard for the last hour.
Until the helicopter exploded.
It was already over the water before Sal noticed it. Black, without any lights, silhouetted by the moon. And quiet. Twenty years ago Sal had taken his wife Maggie on a helicopter ride at the Dells, both of them forced to ride with their hands clamped over their ears to muffle the sound. This one made a fraction of that noise. It hummed, like a refrigerator.
The chopper came over the lake on the east side, low enough that its downdraft produced large eddies and waves. So close to the water Sal wondered if its wake might overturn his twelve foot aluminum boat. He ducked as it passed over him, knocking off his Packers baseball cap, scattering lures, lifting several empty Schmidt beer cans and tossing them overboard.
Sal dropped his pole next to his feet and gripped the sides of the boat, moving his body against the pitch and yaw. When capsizing ceased to be a fear, Sal squinted at the helicopter for a tag, a marking, some sort of ID, but it lacked both writing and numbers. It might as well have been a black ghost.
Three heartbeats later the helicopter had crossed the thousand yard expanse of lake and dipped down over the tree line on the opposite shore. What was a helicopter doing in Safe Haven? Especially at night? Why was it flying so low? And why did it appear to have landed near his house?
Then came the explosion.
He felt it a moment after he saw it. A vibration in his feet, as if someone had hit the bow with a bat. Then a soft warm breeze on his face, carrying mingling scents of burning wood and gasoline. The cloud of flames and smoke went up at least fifty feet.