God Laughs When You Die
Language: English
Pages: 148
ISBN: 0976654628
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
"A host of drug dealers meets a foe they cannot kill. The president accidentally invites demons into the country and watches the pope turn into a sabertooth tiger. A man, dead since 1920, lives again in present day Los Angeles to satiate a malevolent goddess. These tales by Michael Boatman will disturb, terrify and traumatize you. Boatman grabs you by throat and drags you kicking and screaming through his prose. With a dash of Lansdale and a smattering of Martin's Wild Cards, the tales within inhabit the dark and nasty side of our souls, and throughout Boatman infuses it all with a keen wit and an eye for detail. And when he lets you up to breathe, like God, you might just find yourself laughing. This is the sort of stuff I like to read as the bells sound midnight."--Paul Haines, award-winning author of Doorways for the Dispossessed
"Boatman's debut collection will knock you down and kick you in the teeth. Alternatingly hysterical, grotesque, bizarre, and fantastic, Boatman's collection is a must-read for anyone itching to get their hands on fresh new fiction that pulls no punches."--Ronald Damien Malfi, author of The Nature of Monsters and The Fall of Never
"Michael Boatman writes like a visitor from hell. Someone out on short term leave for bad behavior. I love this stuff. He's one of the new, and more than promising, writers making his mark, and a dark and wonderful mark it is."--Joe R. Lansdale
to boot. Ay, muchacho, Moniqua said, the night they christened Chin-Chin’s canister. That’s a lotta chorizo. The Lord had been good to Cyrell in that respect. Around that time, Shed Wilbon - the ex-con who fixed trucks down at Hy’s Auto Repair - came sniffing around. Pretty soon he and Moniqua started carrying on like they were sharing a dirty little joke without letting Cyrell in on the punchline. THWACK! “I said hand me another beer!” Buster said. “You’d best pull your head outta your ass,
kind of “baby fat” that haunts the cheek and jowls of the average chubby American kid. Mohammed “Chun King” Jefferson weighed nearly a hundred twenty pounds after we’d stripped him down to his adult diaper. And this was before he started in on the smorgasbord we’d offloaded onto THE MORRIE STAPLER SHOW stage. “I don’t understand it, Morrie,” the mother, a pretty young thing of Chinese-American ancestry, said. “He wasn’t always like this. When he was born he was…” The mother stopped herself in
from the hungry masses. Their eyes met and Molo’s world turned on its ear. Disoriented, he staggered backward and sat down on his rump. The members of the King’s Shield lay in a circle around the Royal Family. The guardsmen had been beaten into unrecognizable lumps of blood and bone. Only the three ‘Consorts’ stood fast, their weapons leveled at the intruder. A giant corpse loomed in the center of the room. “Zuvembie!" someone screamed. The remaining guests fell over themselves to avoid the
in the air. Master Kani lifted his double bladed stave, the ceremonial weapon of the bladeseer. A white flare of power leapt from the stave and struck Koto D'umbualleh with the rumble of an erupting volcano. Koto tottered; the crimson fire flashed in his eyes. Then he fell to his knees, threw back his head and burst into flames. Cavalu pressed the attack, sped forward to cut the heart from the zuvembie's breast: Other than beheading, it was the only known non-magical way to destroy the undead.
Against my better judgment, I moved up and over the crowd that had gathered outside the post office. As they milled around, wondering where I'd gone, I made my way home, dizzy and reeling from my little disappearing act. But I had a lot of thinking to do before the meeting. I couldn't afford to be distracted. The stakes were way too high. *** We met at Jo Rel's the next day. But a gathering of well-wishers, tourists and wannabes forced us to move to a little table in the back near the kitchen.