With all the hoopla surrounding my book release, I forgot to post this quick writing update a few weeks back.

My story, “The Adventures of an Elderly Couple Unseen  in the Avengers,” appears in the awesome magazine Barrelhouse, as part of their online superhero issue.

This story is part of an ongoing collection of fictions I’ve been writing in which I focus on a throwaway disposable character in a horror/ B-movie (usually someone who appears in a movie solely for the purpose of dying), and try to actually re-create that person in an empathetic and meaningful way.

In the world of the Hollywood horror film (and action film, in the case of The Avengers), people exist as props. They have no back stories. No one cares about them, except as interesting “deaths” or whatever. We watch them appear on-screen, and then we watch them die, and aside from a quick shudder (or a laugh, if the movie is especially bad), we forget about them.

In the fictional world I’ve conjured, though, every human life has value. Every horror movie death is a tragedy, even if it isn’t the A-list lead actor/actress. In fact, the death is made all the more tragic if it isn’t the lead actor…if it’s someone who did not die heroically…if it’s someone whose death meant nothing. That’s some sad shit.

Anyway. Most of the stories I’ve written involve horror movies. This is the only one that takes place in a superhero movie, but The Avengers was definitely a big-budget B-movie, a monster film in the Godzilla tradition, where buildings fall and get knocked down and blow up  and we are asked to not think about the human lives lost in each explosion…Check it out.