Anybody who knows me knows that I really enjoy writing stories set in the 1980s.

My new book THAT OCTOBER is set – for the most part – in October 1984, although there’s some exposition in the book that leads readers back 20-plus years before that.

There’s a “Stranger Things” vibe that a couple of writer friends who kindly blurbed the book noted, although there are no monsters – except for the human kind – in “That October.”

Sara McKinley, my friend who created the wonderful cover for THAT OCTOBER, said she was thinking about “Paper Girls” and other “kids on bikes” stories as she was working on the art. (My kids in the novel are slightly older, although not by much, and more mobile.)

But besides THAT OCTOBER, I wrote another story, “Steel Victory,” which was published in the 2024 Slaughterhouse Press anthology “Maximum Firepower: An ’80s Action Anthology.” The premise behind the Brian G. Berry-created “Maximum Firepower” is that the tales we wrote were inspired by 1980s action movie tropes.

In my story “Steel Victory,” a Captain America-style super soldier escapes from a top-secret lab in 1986 Washington, D.C. This super soldier is no Steve Rogers, however, and when he goes missing he goes on a murder spree.

For the look of the missing super soldier, I pictured Martin Kove, the actor who played the bad guy in “The Karate Kid” and other 80s action pictures and recently returned in the “Cobra Kai” series.

It’s up to three women – the doctor who conceived the project, the “lab rat” who knows more about the project than anyone and the project’s head of security – to track him down in the darkness of D.C.

“Steel Victory” and THAT OCTOBER appealed to me because the time period was very defined and familiar to many of us, even those who were too young to experience it. Everybody knows the trappings of the decade, from “Terminator” movies to “Star Wars” on home video to the music of MTV.

As much as I find my cell phone and the Internet indispensable now, there’s something very freeing about writing about a time when the protagonist couldn’t just pull a phone out of their pocket and call or text some crucial information to someone.

I love research, and one of the things I discovered as I wrote “Steel Victory” was that I couldn’t round up a bunch of those government-issue black SUVs for the search party. SUVs, other than Jeep Cherokees, were not in wide use at the time. So my protagonists had to improvise.

It’s an intoxicating thing, to write about a period that’s so close yet so far away. I hope I get to do it again.

Here’s where you can get “Maximum Firepower” and my story “Steel Victory.”