Tag Archives: GHOST SHOW

My little foul-mouthed scrappers will return in my novel GHOST SHOW

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I’ve noted in this space before that most of my books and short stories occupy the same universe that mostly varies from the town of Seven Angels, Tennessee, to the small city of Middletown, Indiana. The former is the focus of my newest novel, SEVEN ANGELS, and the latter is the setting of my 2025 novel THAT OCTOBER.

I’ve plotted references to those locales in most of my fiction, including my upcoming novel GHOST SHOW, which is set in Middletown in 1948 (THAT OCTOBER was set in Middletown in 1984).

And there’s been a few times I’ve had characters cross over from stories to novels. I’ve previously mentioned here Butcher Crabtree, who pops up in SEVEN ANGELS and a few stories.

But in GHOST SHOW, when it shows up this winter, you’ll see some characters I introduced in “A Fighting Life,” a short story in the 2025/2026 anthology FIGHTING WORDS, edited by Scott Bradburn and published by Leonardo Audio.

Four of the Anderson siblings, who are the focus of GHOST SHOW, are in “A Fighting Life,” which is also set in Middletown in 1948.

They’re pretty different characters in some ways, and very much the same characters in other ways. In “A Fighting Life,” siblings Marie, Saul and Peter get into vacant-lot-punchfests when the three, all of them teens or pre-teens, discover they can make money by letting other neighborhood kids fight them for nickels. They’re foul-mouthed little bastards, as Courtney Fabrizio, the marvelous narrator of my story for Leonardo Audio, alludes to. (You should read the story, but you really should get the audio version of the anthology, particularly for the amazing work of Courtney.).

In the story, Marie, Saul and Peter take on all comers – and get rescued by their big sister Rachel as they’re about to be busted by the cops – and it’s a story that is, by turns, fun and dire.

In GHOST SHOW, Marie, Saul and Peter are still the youngest members of the Anderson family and Rachel sometimes rescues and sometimes needs rescuing. GHOST SHOW is a story that’s very, very loosely based on my mother and her siblings when they were young, and the four are based on one of my aunts, two of my uncles and my mom. There wasn’t as much mayhem in real life as I injected into either the short story or the novel.

I’d encourage you to buy FIGHTING WORDS not just for my story “A Fighting Life” but also for the really crisp and tough writing by the other writers in the anthology. And it might tide you over until GHOST SHOW arrives.

The link to buy FIGHTING WORDS:

My novel GHOST SHOW is coming

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I wrote GHOST SHOW between writing SEVEN ANGELS and THAT OCTOBER.

I’ve always described it as “Rich Man, Poor Man,” but there’s no rich men. It’s VERY loosely based on the post-war years, when my mother’s family had moved to Muncie, Indiana (in the novel from Seven Angels, in real life, from Jamestown, Tennessee) to find work and a life.

The characters, several siblings from the Anderson family, work, play and try to survive and find their consciousness raised in the process.

The novel has gangsters, traveling Romani, infidelity, untimely death, lesbian college professors, a Bela Lugosi-type washed-up movie star, a traveling “ghost show,” a haunted theater with a real ghost named Milo and the President of the United States, Harry Truman, who visited Muncie that year as part of his election campaign.

But know this: Truman’s role is the most tearjerking of the entire book.

We’re going to publish it through Constellate Publishing in the coming months.

Photo above is by my friend John Disher and it’s a photo of the real Rivoli Theater, taken from just below its dome, in the theater’s final days before demolition in the 1980s.

GHOST SHOW is a big book. If you’re looking for a long and absorbing read, this will be it.

I’ll keep you updated here and on social media.

Countdown’s almost over: SEVEN ANGELS publishes tomorrow, June 1

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Okay, I should just acknowledge that when you’ve published a book, the promotional push for it is never over.

But it feels like we’ve reached something of a milestone as my new crime novel SEVEN ANGELS is published tomorrow, June 1, 2026, by Constellate Publishing, a publishing imprint of Constellate Creatives, a company founded by my longtime friend Jill Blocker and for which I do some editing and other work.

By way of noting that promoting a book is never ending, I’ll say that I’ll be darkening your doorstep plenty even after the book is published.

A few quick words on how I got here:

I wrote a few crime novels back in the early 2000s that weren’t completely baked and I didn’t pursue publishing them. A few years later, sometime before 2010, I outlined a book called SEVEN ANGELS, a crime story about a fictionalized version of the little town in Tennessee where my parents grew up.

(I was still about 14 years from being a Tennessee resident myself, but I’d been down here plenty of times, visiting family.)

After I outlined SEVEN ANGELS, I set it aside. I didn’t write a book-length project again until my first true crime book, co-authored with Douglas Walker, was published in 2016. Three more true crime books followed. It turns out that writing and co-writing and editing those books was essential for me in figuring out how to write a book-length manuscript. I’m a plotter and outliner, and turning out an outline – one paragraph per chapter, outline length in total 15 or 16 pages or more – is a step I can’t imagine skipping.

In 2019, I took a buyout from my newspaper job and finally felt I had time and focus to write novels. In a few years, I’d written SEVEN ANGELS, GHOST SHOW and THAT OCTOBER. The latter was the first to be published (self-published) in 2025.

I’d gone back to SEVEN ANGELS almost every year since 2019, fleshing it out with new characters and I hopefully made it better.

The blurbs and comments and reviews have been laudatory and I appreciate it.

For a few months now, I’ve been actively compiling ideas for a new novel, including using some elements from an aborted novel from 2025. (I’ve mined those early 2000s books for a number of ideas and characters, and I’ve done the same with GHOST SHOW, so nothing ever entirely goes to waste.)

So here I am with a promise: I’ll be working on the next novel, along with articles and short stories.

And I’ll be promoting it all, so forewarned is forearmed.

Cellphones replace newspapers for noir surveillance scenes

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For writers and screenwriters of crime and mystery stories, cellphones pose some problems but also some solutions.

Two of the three novels I’ve written have been set pre-cellphones, in 1984 and 1948. I really enjoyed writing scenes for THAT OCTOBER and GHOST SHOW in which the characters have to urgently contact or find each other and can’t communicate via cellphone like my characters in SEVEN ANGELS – set in 2019 – can. It’s a great exercise in how your characters can problem solve.

Cellphones are so handy to modern-day stories that they can pose a problem writers must work around: They’re so handy that you have to find a way to circumvent them, like no cell service or a broken phone or a lost phone. Kind of like how the writers of the Superman comics, radio show, TV show and movies had to find a way around Superman’s godlike powers. The dude is hugely powerful, so you introduce Kryptonite or block him from the rays of the yellow sun, two things James Gunn used in his excellent 2025 film.

But one way that cellphones change everything is surveillance in thrillers, cop stories or spy stories.

No long would a gunsel like Elisha Cook Jr. in “The Maltese Falcon” have to sit in a public place, pretending to read a newspaper, looking so suspicious that Humphrey Bogart clocks him.

These days, a shady type can simply sit or stand and look at their phone, or pretend to. Think about it: How many times a day do you see someone looking at their phone and assume they’re scrolling social media or watching Korean pop music and never think they’re surveilling someone? Surveilling you?

What is a Ghost Show? Well, it’s a novel by me and other things

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I’ve mentioned GHOST SHOW, my unpublished novel set in 1948, a few times on social media. I wrote the book between writing SEVEN ANGELS and THAT OCTOBER and I never expected it to be published. Why? Well, for one thing, it’s set in 1948, in the Midwestern town of Middletown, where THAT OCTOBER takes place (in 1984) and it’s about a family from Seven Angels, Tennessee, and their experiences in the big city.

It’s got a serial killer, a real ghost who’s haunting a theater, a sprawling family story with infidelity, abuse and coming of age as well as President Harry Truman and a traveling ghost show, or spook show, a live-action magic and mystery production that involves several members of the family.

It’s also more than 108,000 words long.

As it turns out, we might publish GHOST SHOW later this year through Constellate Publishing.

So I’m editing GHOST SHOW, a book I haven’t looked at in three or four years, and I’m thinking two things:

I like this story, which is very loosely based on the youthful adventures of my parents and my mom’s family before she was my mom. (Very loosely!)

And I’m thinking … man, 108,000 is a lot of words.

I’ll repeat this explanation before we get close to actual publication, but in answer to what is a ghost show, here’s an article I wrote for CrimeReads four years ago about what the heck ghost shows were.

The Lost History of America’s Traveling “Ghost Shows”