my blood chilled...

A 3-minute excerpt from my new PI/noir/horror/fantasy novel EVERYBODY LIES IN HELL

We were only a half a mile from the entrance to the tunnel when all of lower Manhattan to the right of me disappeared, and my blood chilled as I realized that Al Zaoud must have found a way around
the ravine. I heard the pounding of the horses as if they were right on top of me and then I saw him and his cutthroats out of the corner of my eye. Everything changed then as I was absorbed into his reality. I still had on my cheap suit, but the cab and the rest of my reality was gone.

I went hurtling through the air the same as if Edwin had slammed his cab into a brick wall and I had crashed through the windshield. It made sense since we’d been traveling at forty miles an hour before our abrupt stop. After a hundred feet or so, I landed shoulder first against the rocky terrain and flipped over half a dozen times before my body came to a stop. I knew I didn’t really have any
bones and tendons and internal organs. That it was all part of the illusion. But as I lay there in a heap, I felt as if the shoulder I landed on had been torn apart, that my hip had been shattered into a dozen
pieces, and that my insides had been put through a Cuisinart. I tried to lift my head, and as I shifted weight onto my right arm I clenched my mouth shut to stifle a scream as I realized the bones in the arm had all been snapped.

I collapsed fully on the ground then, and as I moaned in my misery I heard the snorting and hoof beats from dozens of Al Zaoud’s demon horses and could sense that I was surrounded by them. A powerful hand the size of a large ham hock grabbed me by the scruff of my neck and lifted me off the ground, and I found myself staring directly into Al Zaoud’s eyes and all the ancient insanity that they held.

“I should gut you and wear your intestines as a necklace,” he growled.

A deafening crashing...

A 30-second excerpt from my new PI/noir/horror/fantasy novel, Everybody Lies in Hell

A deafening crashing noise exploded behind me, and it sounded as if lightning had struck within feet of me. The whole diner seemed to shake from it. I twisted my neck around and looked out the plate
glass front window, and sure enough the sky had turned an ominous bluish-purple with jagged streaks of lightning bursting through the air. That didn’t make any sense. In my reality the sky was always a
grayish white, and there was never any change in weather. As my gaze shifted toward the horizon, I could see that my Brooklyn was melting away and was being replaced by a harsh mountainous landscape.

An icy fear froze me. Without any conscious thought, I murmured “Oh shit” under my breath, and then I was running as fast as I could to get out the door.

The Caretaker of Lorne Field project launch

Andres Heinz (Black Swan) is writing the screenplay for The Caretaker of Lorne Field.

PW on Everybody Lies In Hell

Publishers Weekly weighs in on my upcoming (Oct. 1st) EVERYBODY LIES IN HELL:

This clever depiction of hell explores the lies that people tell, both to others and to themselves. Mike Stone dies and wakes up in a flawed simulacrum of Brooklyn within the afterlife, created from his patchy memories. He passes eternity by acting as a private investigator for other people who are aware of being dead, finding out how they died or answering questions they still had from when they were alive. Stone moves among the hells created by stronger personalities, such as warlord Al Zaoud and the White Devil of Wallachia, and lesser ones, searching for answers for his clients, as well as for himself. Although the constant repetition of details occasionally grates, it doesn’t detract from the strength of the premise or the power of the story’s resolution. Zeltserman (Husk) has developed a rich world with a complex protagonist, and the stated stagnation of hellish eternity doesn’t stop his story from moving briskly along.

On sale for $2.99!

The Kindle Edition for A Killer's Essence is on sale now for $2.99! Things could've worked out so differently for this book if Penguin hadn't delayed the printing by months, which caused B&N to cancel not only their co-op but their order. It had strong film and TV interest at the start, and I went with the film option with a company that got hit hard by the financial meltdown and never recovered. Now that it's on sale I hope folks check out this supernaturally-tinged crime novel which has a good part of it taking place during the 2004 ALCS between the Sox and NY (and sox fans get to watch the Yankees meltdown from eyes of a diehard Yankees fan). This may or may not be my best book, but I think it's my best written.

“Zeltserman’s lean but muscular style, so evident in “Killer’’ and “The Caretaker of Lorne Field,’’ is just as sharply honed here. His ability to juggle Green’s story and Lynch’s, develop a riveting murder mystery, and even mix in some Brighton Beach ex-KGB sleazeballs, all in less than 250 pages, is a pretty neat page-turning trick.” Boston Globe

“This eerie thriller deftly blurs the lines between madness and the perception of reality.” —The Star-Ledger

“[A] chilling page-turner attuned to the most discerning of avid crime lovers. Well written and well paced. Recommended.” —New York Journal of Books

“Zeltserman’s signature creepiness is available here and there, but what really drives this novel is the engaging portrait of an honest, hardworking cop who, on the job and off, gives the best he’s got, knowing how rarely it will be enough.” —Kirkus Reviews 

"A scary, keep-you-guessing thriller not to be missed.” Booklist

“Highly recommended for those interested in the suspence/noir/thriller genre” A Momentary Taste of Being

“A KILLER’S ESSENCE is complete in itself, but Zeltserman leaves just enough plot threads dangling at the end that a sequel, while not necessary, would be appropriate. And Green? I was screaming at the guy halfway through the book, but by the conclusion, I wanted to buy him a beer. And a ticket to a baseball game. Sequel or not, you need to meet Green and read A KILLER’S ESSENCE.” BookReporter

“It’s here: another entry into the gritty and grim world of Dave Zeltserman. For those unfamiliar, Zeltserman has crafted some of the darkest crime novels to have come out in the past few years, and A KILLER’S ESSENCE shows it’s still a world with no sunshine in sight.” Bookgasm

“Dave Zeltserman takes more risks than any other writer I know. With each book he pushes harder against the comfortable definitions of genre fiction: A Killer’s Essence brilliantly blurs the lines between police-procedural and horror/ paranormal. So forget about pigeon-holing Zeltserman, just grab this book and immerse yourself in the brutal world of an author who is a true original. Then (if you haven’t already) go and read all his others.” Roger Smith

My next novel

My next novel EVERYBODY LIES IN HELL will be published by Eraserhead Press October 1st. From the back cover copy:

Hell can be a tricky place with all of its rules. Mike Stone, hell’s lone practicing private eye, thinks he has it figured out, and more often than not, solves the cases that come his way. It’s not easy, though. Not with the fact that everyone in hell lies. And not with having to worry about a barbaric warlord from a long-forgotten time after his head. Or a compatriot of Vlad the Impaler wanting to purify his soul in a chamber of horrors for all eternity. Or that his circa 1992 Brooklyn private hell might be absorbed at any moment by a more aware soul. And then there’s that creepy Mortuary Man and whatever his agenda might be.

When Stone takes on a young woman as a client who wants him to find out who murdered her, it turns out to be his most dangerous case yet, and what he discovers might just be Hell’s biggest secret.

"In Everybody Lies in Hell Mike Stone's eternal damnation is a private detective's office in a re-imagined Brooklyn. In Hell, the beautiful woman with a case opens a literal Pandora's Box, and Stone is soon inundated by all-too-recognizable evils and lies of Hell's tortured souls, powerful ancient demons and devils, and haunting personal ones. Classic pulp, noir, and horror--think James N. Cain and Bukowski and Palahniuk--are all ground up in a blender and the result is a nasty, wild, and ultimately redemptive novel that only Dave Zeltserman could write."
--Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts

"Everybody Lies in Hell is a wild adventure centered on confronting our demons--literally and figuratively. At once compulsively entertaining and bizarre, Zeltserman has written a metaphysical masterpiece. Hell has never been so much fun."

--Jon Bassoff, author of The Drive-Thru Crematorium

EVERYBODY LIES IN HELL is available for preordering now from Amazon.

Farewell, Dave

Dave Kanell, who formerly owned and operated Kingdom Books in Waterford, VT with his wife, Beth, until it became economically unfeasible, passed away earlier this month. Dave was a goodhearted, generous, and gentle soul who first and foremost loved his wife, then the NY Yankees, crime and mystery books, especially those taking place in Vermont, his corner of his adopted state of Vermont, and his Jewish book collection. Anyone who used to go to the holiday parties at Kate's Mystery Bookstore would've met Dave as one of Kate's helper elves. Similarly, if you'd gone to any of the New England Crimebakes before Dave's health started to fail, you would've had a good chance of meeting him. Or if you were a New England crime/mystery writer while Kingdom Books was still operating, Dave probably would've gone out of his way to help promote your books.

I first met Dave in 2008 at Kate's holiday party. With me being a Jewish writer from New England and Small Crimes taking place in Vermont, it was inevitable that Dave would be interested in the book, and we soon became friends, with Dave and Beth taking a special interest in my writing and helping to promote me in any way they could. Dave might've also been Julius Katz's most ardent fan, and if Beth agrees, I'll find a way for Dave and Kingdom Books to live on in future Julius Katz stories.

Writing can be a hard business, but what makes it worthwhile is meeting and becoming friends with people like Dave. I always enjoyed our phone calls, whether we talked about books, our favorite authors, the publishing industry, baseball, politics, or whatever subject we ended up on. I'll miss Dave. The world has gotten a little bit colder without Dave being part of it.

The short story ending

I  don't necessarily want to play favorites here and give short shrift to the novel, but a great ending is more important for a short story. Good endings are needed for novels--you can think of a novel as a large ocean liner being brought into port. The ship has been out at sea for days and it's been a fun trip, and you certainly don't want to ruin it at the end by crashing and sinking the ship as it's being brought into the harbor. As long as most folks leave the ship happy, good job! And so with a novel, it's the journey that matters most, although a stunning and startling ending certainly doesn't hurt.

Short stories are different. The reader needs a great ending for the story to be worth their time.

So what makes a great ending? It depends on the genre.

For mysteries, all the elements to solve the mystery have to be present so the reader has a fair chance to solve it, yet doesn't, but still ends up admiring the solution and not feeling cheated.

For crime fiction (and other genres as well), the endings I strive for are ones that changes everything the reader believed he or she knew about the story and does so in a way that makes perfect sense. It will leave the reader gobsmacked.

I am now a Black Mask author

There's no crime writer I admire more than Dashiell Hammett. The Continental Op stories are a gift to all of us, and Hammett's five novels in a way created five different subgenres of crime fiction: The Maltese Falcon, the search for the MacGuffin, Red Harvest, the stranger cleaning up the crime-ridden town, The Glass Key, the political crime novel, The Dain Curse, the supernatural crime novel, and The Thin Man, the screwball crime novel. There's never been a writer who has had more influence on the crime fiction genre than Hammett and whose works I revere more. Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine is the premiere crime fiction magazine, and I never take it for granted being published within its hallowed pages, but it's because of Hammett's connection with Black Mask that having my 18th EQMM story be published as a Blask Mask story means something extra special to me.

You can read an excerpt of my story Brother's Keeper.

The Investigator has been Investigated!

Publishers Weekly has conducted a thorough investigation of The Julius Katz Collection, and their conclusion: fresh and funny … There’s good fun to be had along with the brainteasers in this sprightly volume.