King of the Perverts now available for the Kindle

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King of the Perverts has arrived for your Kindle (CLICK HERE), with the paperback coming soon…

Click the pic!

And here’s another nice blurb I just got yesterday: ”Steve Lowe is depraved! He taught me a few things with this hilarious, dangerous, sexy (?) book… None of which I wanted to learn. Take a ride with the King of the Perverts–just strap your clean thoughts and innocence in a car-seat, and hopefully they’ll survive the trip.”  –Kevin Shamel, author of Rotten Little Animals, Island of the Super People, and Porn Land (forthcoming).

King of the Perverts: It’s so close…

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King of the Perverts is almost ready, maybe a week or two from being available. In the meantime, pleasure your eyeballs with Matthew Revert’s amazing jacket design:

What are people saying about the book so far? Glad you asked!

“Great, hilarious stuff that also raises a lot of questions about money, fame, gender and, more importantly, the Dirty Sanchez.” – Andersen Prunty, author of Fuckness and Hi I’m a Social Disease

“I get airsick pretty goddamned easily. But I kept reading while I was on the plane. Even through the turbulence. I started at the Dallas/Forth Worth Airport eating a veggie burger in a  TGIFridays and ended whilst descending into Arizona. The unsuspecting woman sitting beside me had no idea. It was awesome. Completely amazing in so many ways. So sick. Oh, so sick.” – Caris O’Malley, author of The Egg Said Nothing

Book review: Infinity House, by Shane McKenzie

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Infinity HouseInfinity House by Shane McKenzie

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I liken the experience of reading Shane McKenzie’s debut novella INFINITY HOUSE to what I suppose Lassie’s little buddy, Timmy, experienced falling down that well. You think you know what you’re doing going in, not worried about the consequences of fooling around near an old, abandoned well. I’m fucking Timmy, after all, I’m a blond-haired, blue-eyed little prick with an awesome dog, what the fuck could happen to me? You think I’m going to let some shitty, forgotten well scare me? Fuck that and fuck you.

And then you’re falling, tumbling, down into the dark, faster than you even realize, all manner of horrific ideas running through your mind, including such thoughts as, oh fuck, I’m falling down this well, which is likely filled with monsters and evil and snakes and bones and spiders and raccoon urine and clowns. And then you hit the bottom.

That’s this book. It’s got the monsters and the evil, but instead of spiders, you have flies, and instead snakes, it’s maggots. A sea of maggots up to your chest, and rotting meat, disgusting stench, liquefied nastiness. INFINITY HOUSE is the story of Mike and his little brother James. They live in The Oak, a ghetto where Mike sells weed out the front door to pay the bills. His grandmamma is infirm and his mother is dead and only Mike is left to care for James.

Mike is ripped off by a customer toting a shotgun and loses his stash and his cash, but little brother James comes home with money in hand. He found it over at the creepy haunted house that everyone in The Oak knows to steer clear of, but with no money and no more weed to sell to make some money, Mike and James head to the house to see what more they can find. OH SHIT MIKE DON’T GO IN THAT HAUNTED HOUSE YOU DUMBASS IT’S HAUNTED BY A CHILD-KILLING FREAK! STOP SMOKING THE MARIJUANA IT’S DESTROYING YOUR SENSES!

That’s about all the setup you need, and all the setup you’re going to get because by the time Mike and his little bro step inside the house, you’re headed straight down that well. The story takes off like a roman candle at that point, piling on one slippery, slimy, disgusting, horrific scene after the next until you finally splash down at the bottom and try to catch your breath, or at least keep from ralphing in your lap. I won’t lie, there are a few passages in here that got my stomach turning. I expected this book to be nasty, but it still managed to get to me.

But that what’s it’s supposed to do. INFINITY HOUSE is straight up gross-out horror, and it doesn’t even attempt to be anything more than that, which is cool. McKenzie, in an interview included in the back of the book, says as much. He’s out to shock you, stun you, make you feel queasy, uncomfortable, lightheaded, sick, whatever he can get. If the idea of millions of squirming maggots and rotting, mushy meat squishing under your feet is too much for you, then you’ll probably want to take a pass on this one. But if you dig that sort of thing, McKenzie is a name to watch out for.

Personally, I don’t go out of my way to seek out the extreme horror, but I don’t reject it out of hand, either. I think it takes skill to write a story that’s both compelling and also over-the-top nasty at the same time. That type of book can get tedious and just flat gross real fast. To his credit, McKenzie doesn’t let it get to that point. He doesn’t give us a lot of characterization when it comes to Mike or James, but he trades that in for a short little rocket ride of gore that will be over before you know it, if you can just hold out to the end. I’m intrigued and looking forward to what he comes up with next.

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Book review: DIE, You Bastard! DIE! by Jan Kozlowski

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Die, You Bastard! Die!Die, You Bastard! Die! by Jan Kozlowski

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I highly recommend Jan Kozlowski’s brutal revenge story DIE, YOU BASTARD! DIE! I read this sucker in a day because I physically could not stop reading it. You really will want that bastard dead and enjoy what he has coming to him. One of the more inventive torture scenes I can recall. Excellent rape revenge exploitation and a great start for the new Ravenous Shadows line of genre books. It’s short, but not detrimentally so because the story is tight, taut, and well told at a near-breathless, hardboiled, brutal pace. READ, you bastard! READ!

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Birthday Follow-Up Post: The Best Gift I Got

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My birthday was three days ago, but I want to share with the world the best gift I got – this birthday card from Vince Kramer:

Vince Kramer, for those who may not know, is the author of the fantastically over-the-top New Bizarro Author Series book Gigantic Death Worm. If you think this picture is funny, then I guarantee you’ll find Gigantic Death Worm funny. To read Gigantic Death Worm is to know Vince Kramer. It’s a whacked out roller coaster ride of the absurd and hilarious and the hilariously absurd. I promise you, none of this is exaggeration. It would be impossible to embellish the craziness of that book because it goes beyond pretty much anything. And my copy has a personalized drawing of a McDonalds by Vince himself, which is braggable.

Shit, I’m 37

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Today is my 37th birthday. Just three short years from 40 and official creepy old guy status. Despite this troublesome stage of life inching ever closer, I really don’t dwell on my age very often. I don’t think I’m at risk for a midlife crisis or anything, unlike a certain relative who went out and got a BMW convertible once he reached COG age. It’s just not that big of a deal to me. One reason is that I continue to find things to keep myself occupied so I don’t sit around and take stock of my life on a regular basis. I try to move forward and work toward goals, rather than reflect on how few of them I have achieved thus far. Liquor helps me accomplish this.

One of those goals is writing books and seeing them published. I’ve written three new ones since December, one of which will be coming out soon. Last night, I got a cool birthday present: the first round of edits for that next book, KING OF THE PERVERTS. It will be out sometime this summer from Grindhouse Press, and in celebration of getting one step closer to legal curmudgeon status, I thought I would share the first few lines from the book. Here’s a tentative back cover description:

Poor Dennis. He’s a regular sort of guy who’s recently been dealt a shitty hand by life: he lost his job, his wife hates him and wants a divorce, and it turns out she was also cheating on him as well. And the baby wasn’t his. And he’s living on his brother’s couch. Holy fuck, that sucks. Dennis can’t imagine things could get much worse, and that’s why he jumped at the opportunity to take part in a new reality game show: a “sexcathlon” where the first person to achieve 10 increasingly difficult and perverted sexual challenges wins a million dollars and is crowned King of the Perverts. Dennis doesn’t care about the title, he just wants the money, but now he’s not sure he can make it to the end. Enduring a Golden Shower and following through with an Abe Lincoln are hard enough, but he’s losing his nerve and fears what act of perversion will come next. He’d like to drop out, but his Russian bear of a cameraman, Mongo, has other plans for Dennis and that million dollar prize, and he has to decide which is worse: winning the crown of King of the Perverts, or losing it.
And now, a selection from Part I:

THE GOLDEN SHOWER

Hearing the words coming out of my own mouth confirms that I have slipped into some alternate reality.

Up is down. Black is white. Peter Venkman’s voice echoes in my head. Cats and dogs and mass hysteria, all that jazz.

Before me stands, quite possibly, the hottest chick I have ever been in the same room with. She is five-alarm. Tall, dark hair, voluptuously rounded, and best of all, wearing nothing but a sheer lace thong. You really can’t classify them as underwear, more like the rumor of underwear. Like the eerie outline left on the ground following a nuclear blast. Saran wrap covers more skin than these babies.

And I am asking this woman to pee on me.

Her head jerks back like I had connected with a right hook to her jaw. “You want me to do what?”

Fuck me. Do I really have to say it again? Somewhere in the bathroom, my Albanian cretin cohort Mongo has planted at least one camera and quite possibly two or three to get different angles of this big moment. I swear I can hear him in the next room, on the other side of the paper-thin wall of this shithole motel he has found, stifling his laughter. I say a quick prayer, asking that he might choke on that laughter and die, slowly, and in agonizing pain.

I lower my head and concentrate on the scarred, faded bathroom tile under my knees. I wonder how many such acts have taken place in this very spot before I came along. I also wonder how often it has been cleaned after such acts have concluded. By the looks of it, quite a few, and not very often. I say another quick prayer of thanks for the heady decision to keep my pants on.

“Um… I said I want you to… pee on me.”

I can’t bring myself to look up at her and instead fixate on her lovely navel, which is quite lovely indeed. She stumbles back a bit and wavers, trying to balance through the fog of four appletinis. I was hoping that would have been a sufficient number of appletinis to keep her from running, horrified and disgusted, out of the room the second I told her exactly what I was hoping she would do to me, but now I fear she isn’t drunk enough just yet. Curse you, shitty Applebees bartender and your watered down, suburban-housewife-strength mixing skills!

* * *

So that’s how KING OF THE PERVERTS begins. More to come very soon.

In the meantime, I’m going to take advantage of my birthdayness to post some links to my stuff that’s currently available, most of which is either free or just a buck on Kindle. Thanks for reading and supporting a creepy old dude.

MUSCLE MEMORY: http://www.amazon.com/Muscle-Memory-ebook/dp/B004TGTFAC/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2

MUSCLE MEMORY 2: MORE MUSCLE, MORE MEMORY (the free sequel): https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/80094

MR. FLASHBACK (writing as Son Porter): http://www.amazon.com/dp/B006YAYVGE#_

WOLVES DRESSED AS MEN: http://www.amazon.com/Wolves-Dressed-as-Men-ebook/dp/B004ASNCWG/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=books&qid=1288983297&sr=1-1

The Versatile Blogger Award + Two Announcements

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Let us begin this post with a disclaimer: I don’t normally do chain mails things. Not if it’s blogs or Facebook status updates that read “… I bet most of my friends won’t copy and paste this to their own status…” Even if it’s about cancer or kitties, or kitties with cancer, I don’t give a shit. I just don’t do them and generally despise reading them.

SAVE TUMOR CAT - Pass this along or you'll go to HELL!

However…

I’m going to break that vow right here, in the name of promoting fellow authors and other shit I like. All of that being prelude to this: my good friend A.J. Brown has bestowed upon me, for reasons that can only lead to a conclusion of brain damage on his part, the Versatile Blogger Award. If it had come from anyone else, I might have just ignored it as Internet nonsense, but I do love me some A.J. Brown, so the exception has been made. Now, let’s get it on.

What the fuck is the Versatile Blogger Award? Dude, click the link above for more info.

What does one do once they’ve won the award? Besides holding a party in their own honor, getting totally shitfaced, and passing out facedown in the bathtub, they’re supposed to do this shit:

* Thank the award-giver and link back to their blog in your post. (check)

* Include a link to the original blog, The Versatile Blogger Award. (checkerino)

* Share seven things about yourself. (I’ll always talk about myself. See below)

* Pass this award along to fifteen blogs you enjoy reading. (er, no)

* Contact your chosen bloggers to let them know about the award. (still undecided about this part as it seems pretty lame…)

* There is no deadline for responding, although I would imagine that being “fairly prompt” would be the polite thing to do. (DON’T YOU FUCKING TELL ME TO BE POLITE, I GOT POLITE RUNNING OUT OF MY ASS, I’M SO OVERSTUFFED WITH POLITE YOU SONOFABITCH!)

Before we go further, I already know I can’t name 15 blogs I enjoy reading, whom I would also pass this thing along to, nor would I do that anyway. That would be the chain-mail aspect about this that makes me break out in a rash. But I will contact the person whom I name as my Versatile Blogger (if I end up doing that) and let that person do with this as they wish. And besides, most of the blogs I like have a large readership and are probably inundated by similar stuff all the time, and I have no interest in spamming them with this. But I will link to them and spread the word and the love around like it was fucking peanut butter. Oh yeah, baby, peanut butter love…

First, I’ll share seven things about myself that you, Captain Reader, may not know:

1. I hate oranges. Hate those fuckers. Can’t stand the taste, can’t stand the smell, don’t like orange juice or orange soda or orange candy or orange julius. Add some vodka and make it a screwdriver? You just ruined perfectly good vodka. Nice going, ass.

2. In January, I self-published a novel under a pen name. I’ve been trying to decide how to market the thing since it’s, you know, published under a pen name, but I might as well announce it here. It’s most decidedly not bizarro, which is why I didn’t put it out under my own name, and I confess to being curious about the whole self-publishing deal. I thought I’d try it myself, if for no other reason, than to get a better idea of a different facet of the publishing world besides just the writing side. The novel is Mr. Flashback by Son Porter (and it’s $0.99 for the Kindle here on Amazon). Don’t ask where the name came from, there is no real significance to it. It’s just easy to remember.

3. Speaking of books, I will have a new one coming out soon. Grindhouse Press will publish my novella King of the Perverts sometime this summer. I can’t tell you how stoked I am about this book, and also about working with Grindhouse. They put out great pulp horror and bizarro and their books look, and are, utterly fantastic.

4. For you horror fans, I make this admission: I absolutely hated Richard Matheson’s book Hell House. Just hated it. I found it to be dumb, cheesy writing and not at all scary. I spent the whole book yelling at the idiot characters. Flame away.

5. That’s two things I hate, so I better list something I love: severe thunderstorms. It doesn’t matter if the tornado sirens are going off, branches are flying through the air, rain is pelting my face, lightning is exploding all around – I’m that dumbass who stands out in the middle of a thunderstorm, hoping to glimpse for myself a tornado. If I had the money, I would take one of those tornado chasing vacations in Kansas or Oklahoma.

6. The first thing I ever wrote was a fully-illustrated fanfic of my favorite cartoon when I was about 6 or 7, Battle of the Planets (G Force). I loved their spaceship, the Phoenix, and always wished I could have found a toy version of it. I never did, but it apparently does exist.

7. I spent nine months of my childhood inside an iron lung.

OK, that last one is not true. I’m actually just a big fat liar.

Now, on to the blogs I regularly check out:

1. AJ Brown’s Type AJ Negative: Lots if introspective stuff about writing and fatherhood, being a husband, and juggling all those things. And as I mentioned, AJ and I have a little long-distance bromance going on, so… (blush)

2. John Skipp is Yer Pal Skipp!: No, this has not been around long, but the few posts Skipp has up so far have been so inspiring and helpful over the past month that I find myself checking regularly to see if he has a new post up yet. That’s why it’s here.

3. John Scalzi’s Whatever: I can’t not read whatever Scalzi posts, because more often than not, he writes exactly what I’m thinking about a particular subject. GET OUT OF MY HEAD, SCALZI!

4. The Cubs-centric baseball blog Bleacher Nation: I’m gonna throw a change-up here (PUN!) and add a sports blog, because goddammit, I gots me some roots in sports writing. And this is my list, so blah.

5. The something of Andersen Prunty, Lowered Expectations: Not exactly updated regularly, but when it is, it is always interesting and entertaining. Currently, he’s holding a contest for readers to create a cover for his upcoming book, Fill the Grand Canyon and Live Forever.

6. Nathan Bransford: More of an occasional read for me, but regularly updated with interesting news and insights into publishing and writing. Worth the time.

7. JA Konrath’s A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing: The always interesting but equally annoying Konrath expounds on sticking it to the man through self-publishing. I like his transparency and willingness to share numbers and info, but am equally enraged by his insistence on posting in the third person. That just bugs Lowe.

8. Caris O’Malley’s Hipster Librarian: There is never a time when Caris fails to make me laugh. A great majority of that time, I’m laughing at him, but still, you can’t argue the results!

9. Kirk Jones’s bizarrojones: Kirk likes to examine bizarro and horror art and literature through a scholarly, professorial lens. I like to read Kirk and pretend I’m smart like him.

10. Redneck bizarro robot genius, David W. Barbee: Goofy fun from a bizarro son of the south. God Save Us, George W. Foxworthy!

11. College football fun from EDSBS: OK, one more sports blog. If you’re not a college football fan or observer, you probably won’t get much of what’s here, but if you are, and you do, then this shit is gold, more often than not.

12. Um… hmmmmmmmmm… There are other blogs I occasionally read, but I think I’ll stop this list here. I will reserve the right to come back and add to this list when I inevitably remember the ones I forgot to include.

If you made it all the way through to the end of this, then I now have one question: why? If you can answer that question in no fewer than 200 words, I will email you a free copy of Son Porter’s dynamic debut novel Mr. Flashback. Send your essays to: lowe435@gmail.com

OK, bye bye!