I promised you folks that I would have more news regarding a second CREEP SQUAD release – and here it is!
I have just launched a sample pack of Creep Squad stories entitle BIGFOOT TRACKS.
Click here to order your Kindle copy today – just 99 cents!
There are three stories in this small collection.
The first story – originally published in Mark Leslie’s Tesseracts 16 – is entitled “Three Thousand Miles of Cold Iron Tears” and involves a battle between the Bigfoot and a Yaksha – a demon that eats tears – and takes place at the driving of the Last Spike of the cross-Canada railway.
The second story – “Ring Rock Riot” – is a meeting of Bigfoot and a Sea Hag and was originally published by Jersey Devil Press.
The third story – “A Couple of Bottles of Watered Down Wine” – is an intervention between a long-forgotten Canadian masked hero who has joined the Creep Squad and a certain lightning-activated monster, sewn together from pieces of long dead men.
The book is available right now on Kindle for a measly 99 cents.
I’ll be looking for some reviews over the next week or so if anyone is interested in receiving a review copy.
Here’s a short excerpt from the first story in the collection.
THREE THOUSAND MILES OF COLD IRON TEARS
Nothing reeks worse than a sopping wet Sasquatch.
It was mid-November and the sky looked dark enough to hold a grudge against the dirt for a very long time. It had rained down sleet all morning long and I was sogged straight through to the bone. The wind was blowing in hard from the Rockies and I was not happy at all to be standing here in the Eagle Pass, staring at a large shed-encased mural by the side of the Canadian Pacific Railway at a point in the landscape that men called Craigellachie.
I don’t really know who painted the mural but there was a good strength showing in his brushstroke. He had made a sound choice in his colors, as well. The hopeful blue skyline blended nicely with the heavy umber figures. The shed that covered the mural was about nine feet high and it was almost tall enough for me to stand beneath.
Almost.
There was a story in the mural and stories were something that I understood. You see, that is what I am. I was a living story – something that people told around lonely smoking campfires. I was a Sasquatch – a nine foot tall shag carpet with a serious-bad attitude. I was a legend and a rural myth and a totally unsubstantiated rumor. Like I said, just a story – only stories, if told well and often enough, in time grow a life of their own.
I can’t really explain to you how it happens. It’s not as if I came into this world with a user’s guide. All that I can tell you is that the Sasquatch have been told into life since back in the days of the Mesopotomania storytellers who spoke in hushed whispers of the exploits of Enkidu and Gilgamesh – and so long as your people continued to tell stories about random hirsute giants growing up in the wilderness and sometimes being raised by wolves or African great apes, then we will continue to live on in the borderlands that haze and drift warily between the carefully demarcated lines that claim to separate the cold steel facts of reality from the warm pure smoke of your collective imagination.
“So were you there?” I asked.
“I was there,” the ghost of Sam Steele replied.
“I don’t see you in the picture,” I said.
“I was there,” Sam repeated. “Take my word for it.”
“Maybe you weren’t so ugly back then,” I offered. “Maybe I just don’t recognize you.”
“I was there,” Sam Steele’s ghost echoed for the third time. “I just wasn’t in the picture, is all.”
Sam was a story, too. The real Sam Steele had died back in 1919 – after fighting with the Fenians, chasing Louis Riel during the Red River Rebellion, meeting in a sit-down wiki-up with the great Sitting Bull himself, single-handedly taming the Klondike and fighting a half a thousand Boers over in Boerland. Not all of that is true, you understand but the gist of it is. Sam’s actual exploits had grown to near mythic status. He had achieved a kind of sordid low-rent immortality thanks to a multitude of novels and newspaper articles and a movie or two and campfire tales and once even a CBC minute vignette commercial.
Hell, they had even named a mountain after him.
That is all I have got for you today.
If that intrigued you why don’t you pick up a copy and give it a read.
At the very least leave a comment and let me know how you liked the excerpt.
Yours in storytelling,
Steve Vernon
YOURS IN STORYTELLING... 