Suite 13 eBook

Cover and interior illustrations by Tom Canty.

Take the lift to the thirteenth floor, wait thirteen seconds…the key in your hand fits the lock. We’ve been waiting for you.

Inside Suite 13, the floorplan changes when you’re not looking, and the mirrors show you things you’d rather not see. Award-winning author David J. Schow loves the view in this joint…and the room service. You’re invited inside to experience:

Private dicks so hardboiled they’re dead…things lurking in deep, dark cave networks…those who visit your grave when the night winds wail…the easiest way in the world to change your entire identity in a snap…a heister with too many enemies to kill…a deeply-committed cadre of midnight racers…a serial killer fond of observing national holidays…a world where killing children is not only easy, but necessary…

Among these you’ll also see familiar faces such as the denizens of Clive Barker’s Midian (from Night Breed), Mike Mignola’s Hellboy, George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead universe, and Joe R. Lansdale’s world of The Drive-In.

Nonfiction visitors await your pleasure as well: John Wyndham’s Triffids, the “Poe-Poe Platters,” the exploits of the one-and-only Jack the Ripper (all of them) and James Bond, fantastic fictioneers named Bloch, Stefano, Trevanian, and two named Brown, and DJS’s own commentary on everything from the horrors of the 1950s to the horrors of the total end of the entire freakin’ world as we know it!

This volume includes four brand-new stories, never before published.

The darkest party ever is going on in Suite 13…and you’re on the guest list.

Table of Contents:

Fiction

• Red Meat Flag
• Draggers
• Williamson’s Folly
• I Am Become Death
• Hard-boiled Dick Tea
• Collector
• Fame Whore
• Long Black Veil
• Twenty Dead Men
• Matheson’s Paradox
• Odeed
• Caving
• Hide/Invert
• Normal

Non-Fiction

• “Blame Hermes”
• “The Fearsome Fifties”
• “The Battle for Bond”
• “Joseph Stefano”
• “Day of the Wyndham(s)”
• “Beginning with the End”
• “a.k.a. Trevanian”
• “The Best Celebrity Toupee in Hollywood”
• “Matheson, Senior”
• “Ripping the Jacks”
• “Preface to ‘Old Frank and Jesus’ by Larry Brown”
• “Poe-Poe Platters”
• Review of The Lights in the Sky are Stars by Fredric Brown.
• Aft13word

Red Meat Flag
(excerpt)

Here’s a sentence I never thought I’d express in a zillion years: Mister Tweezers really makes my sinuses hurt.

I’m punching the speed limits—pantsing them, actually—en route to the latest crime scene. The gumball tells onlookers I’m privileged. Modern LED flashers are tarted up with adjectives like “tactical” this-or-that, but the light you stick on the dashboard of an unmarked, standard-issue patroller is still called a gumball, a reference that’s at least fifty years old, which places it comfortably within my realm of sociological irrelevance.

Go figure.

Long Black Veil
(excerpt)

His name was Guy.

What guys call a “guy-guy;” what used to be called a man’s man, I guess. One of those martial arts lunatics who can wheelchair you with a flick of their eyelid, so I shot him to make sure he was as dead as a turkey melt. That’s when the trouble really started—after I’d killed him.

Twenty Dead Men
(excerpt)

When the guy in the bathrobe regained consciousness, sucking in blood-misted breath, Proctor hit him in the face with the pistol again, just out of sheer need to vent frustrated energy.

Proctor’s bank—that morning, a bit over a hundred K—was inadequate to the demands recent events imposed on his universe. He would have to alter his appearance, which meant surgery, and surgery meant out-of-country travel. He would have to secure the best new identification possible, which meant building an entirely new identity from the ground up. When you are a professional thief, such precautions sucked time and hemorrhaged money. But Proctor’s name had been spoken, and connected to a photograph of his face. Once that pairing had escaped into the digital realm, there was no way to manually keep such a sieve from leaking. No longer being invisible, Proctor had to make hard decisions quickly, or the combination of his name and his face would doom him just as quickly. He had no desire to do jail or be dead. He had experienced the former and skirted the latter enough times already, and his personality—what there was of it—did not admit of despair, suicide or a mid-life career change.

When all other options are eliminated, the path is crystal clear. The path doesn’t seek your approval; it merely exists to be ignored or appeased. To ignore the new dangers spelt the end. To appease them would take more money than Proctor had.

Damage control would become even more corrosive if Proctor did not act now. The damage wrought by exposure of his face and name would metastasize and fade his life to black. Time was running out for this face, this name.

Which is why Proctor chose to introduce himself to Alcott Gudmunson, the guy in the bathrobe.

Caving
(excerpt)

I told Mike to hold up a bit because the tunnel was getting narrower.

Mike and I had caved off and on for about a year. We weren’t spelunkers or professionals, merely lackadaisical teenagers stuck in the boring-ass small town of your choice…with access to mountains and caverns. Call it Colorado, or Arizona. It didn’t matter where, any more than it mattered where my parents dumped me next. Our gear was all scrounged or home-made; this was a couple of decades back, when you couldn’t get boutique skatepunk knee pads or helmet cams or use your phone for a flashlight. I was the spawn of mobile parents, practically gypsies—I didn’t share the same growing-up class of kids from the time I was in third grade until I were almost free of high school. A new house, practically every year, but no home. My younger brother and I played whatever we were dealt. Mike and I were thrown together for the summer of 1972. If America continued fighting in Southeast Asia much longer, we’d both have to start thinking serious thoughts about the draft.

By then I’d be gone anyway, to some other home in some other town maddeningly like this one.