Why I Absolve Martin Scorsese of the $500 He Owes Me for Physical Therapy

This is a post about why Martin Scorsese owes me 500 bucks I have no more hope of collecting than Dirk Gently has of getting paid for finding Henry the Cat and seeing him safely home, but also about how Martin (can I call you “Martin,” Martin?) saved my life, thereby balancing the scales of any debt, maybe even putting me in his. (Thanks for that, too, MS.)

So.

This week, in December of 2023, I started physical therapy, including twice daily bouts of rolling my left leg painfully back and forth from hip to knee on a foam pad. Like the dude in the photo but with a lot more grimacing. It takes about 80 minutes a day to get through the whole set. The reason I do this is, about six months ago my hip started making a clicking sound when I walked, moving on to throbbing pain, pinged nerves and tendons, and the assorted pains you get in other parts of your body when you try to compensate for a lack of function or to avoid pain in another. This was not a random artifact of my gracefully aging body. This was a direct result of a choice made by Martin Scorsese, a choice to do what he does so well: make a movie.

Due to a combo of naive optimism, a constant surplus of current & future dangers to focus on, and a memory like a steel sieve, I tend not to memorize the dates of personal or even public misfortunes. But I know the date Martin Scorsese’s actions caused me to step on a loose manhole cover and bang down my shin hard on the hole’s metal rim. The date was March 30, 1981. A school day. A Monday to be precise. If you weren’t born then, you’re forgiven for not attaching special significance to it, but even if you were around it’s unlikely the date means much. But you remember it; and a lot of other people do, too, and did because they had no choice.

Back up a few years and you’ll get it:

In 1976, Mr. Scorsese (I just can’t call you “Martin,” Mr. S.; it feels weird) released a movie called Taxi Driver. People talk about the butterfly effect–an insignificant event leading to a major one, but in this case, there are little butterflies flapping the wings on both ends of a bell curve. One end is Scorsese’s incipient idea to make the film (probably conceived over martinis and cocaine at an all-night yacht party [I kid, though, c’mon, it was the ’70s); on the other end of that bell curve is my bank account being steadily denuded by weekly insurance co-pays to my (excellent) physical therapist. I figure, conservatively, I’ll soon be out the $500 mentioned up front as my asking price for granting absolution. In the middle of these tiny moments are the inspired characters called Travis Bickle and Iris, a delusional man who thought both were real, and a tragically maimed press secretary of whom I in no way wish to make light. And a nearly dead US president. Yeah, now you get it: the nearly successful murder of Ronald Reagan, inspired by a movie and made possible by our nation’s gun laws, happened on March 30, 1981. I’m not much of a fan of Reagan, the protean man or more protean politician, but I’m far less of a fan of living in a society shaped by political assassinations, so let’s agree regardless of Reagan’s policies that murdering him was never an acceptable intervention in a civilized society. That quadruple shooting was the crest of the bell curve for the country. For me, the crest of the curve, wave, or whatever, was stepping on the manhole cover.

It was Monday. I was walking home from the middle school, which was farther from the elementary school where my sister went, so she was already home. I was at the edge of the yard when she burst through the front door screaming, “Come quick, the president’s been shot!” Those are tremendous words to hear, and I started running across the yard. We had a sunken water meter that was recessed about two feet into the ground at the bottom of a steel oval. One of the neighborhood delinquents, which were legion, had been fiddling with ours over the weekend and had filled it about halfway up with gravel, then put the lid back on haphazardly. I never found out who, but nobody from that neighborhood has the kind of money Martin Scorsese has, so in the American tradition, let’s forget about them as non-entities. Sprinting across the yard toward my distraught sibling, I sped without the normal care I’ve always exercised without exception at all other moments in life, and I stepped on the cockeyed steel cover of the meter, which flipped, spilling me on my face and my left shin onto the steel lip of the oval. I was running on endorphins at the moment, and young, so I hopped up and ran in to watch the Special Reports for the rest of the afternoon. I had a gash on my leg that I eventually washed and then forgot about until my left leg started swelling about a year later. Soon thereafter, it had grown to be 2 inches more in circumference than the right calf was. An X-ray revealed the bang from the fall had created a bone spur that had fused the two bones in my lower leg and was pushing them apart. After that, a doctor cut open my leg and chopped out the offending bridge between tibia and fibula with a hammer and a chisel. This surgery, which, as demonstrated, was 100% the result of Taxi Driver, was removed the summer between my 8th and 9th grade years in school and is, according to my physical therapist, the cause of my current hip pain ailments (never minding that time I landed on it after falling off a third-story balcony in Mexico while retrieving a bullwhip [another story entirely]).

So, clearly I have made an air-tight case that the famous and, let’s face it, well-heeled, Hollywood director should foot the cost for my leg. Clearly.

Except, he shouldn’t. Because, being honest, as ever, that attempted assassination day in that long-ago March became a pivot point in my life. It was the day separating those tender years of youth when I would carelessly step on manholes in the naive assumption that they must be properly affixed from those cynical years following the event when I would never trust an ounce of weight to anything I hadn’t tested. Ask my family. I don’t do it. It doesn’t matter how much of the sidewalk the manhole or metal doors or bulkheads take up, I walk around them. This traumatic response to the pain and suffering caused me by Mr. Martin Scorsese probably saved my life twelve years later. This happened in 1993 in the remains of the collapsed Soviet Union (an event many have given Reagan a lot of credit for). I was living in a major urban area there that had no outside lighting at night in part because thieves had stripped all the wires from the streetlamps and sold them. They also stole most of the city’s manhole covers, leaving gaping holes in the sidewalk through which one could plummet to various depths and onto various implements of impalement. It was best not to use a flashlight if you had to venture out, because flashlights attracted unwanted attention, including that of the local police (who mugged one of my friends living there and stole all his money). No lights and no manhole covers. You see where this is going? Thanks to Martin Scorsese, I developed a sixth sense when it comes to navigating streets; I can distinguish the darkest shades of black and gray from each other and I can tell when there is a manhole in front of me no matter how dim the light. Suffice to say, crossing a street one night in said metropolis, I saw a circle in the road and stepped around it, only after passing it feeling the air belching out of the rancid intestines of the city beneath the street. It was a moment, like the one in my front yard, where life might have pivoted, and falling into a hole in a city where surgeons did their work by candlelight and patients had to buy their own (stolen) X-ray plates and surgical supplies on the black market in the bazar would have been a great deal worse than having a competent surgeon in a sanitary hospital go at me with a chisel and a hammer. But this time, there was no pivot. I walked on, the moment came and went, remaining insignificant when it might have been devastating, again, thanks to the intervention of Martin Scorsese. At the time, my hip was even fine, years not having caught up to me as they apparently have in 2023.

So, Martin; sir. Mr. Scorsese: for this I absolve you of your debt to me, and, in fact, I thank you for the role you played in saving my life that night in a darkened city on the plains. If we ever meet, consider this an IOU for another martini.

-FIN-

Recommended: “Family and Other Ailments”

M. E. Proctor’s latest book, Family and Other Ailments, is a collection of family-centered noir and fantasy stories perhaps best described as “speculative crime-fiction.” Inventive stories like “Key Ring,” in which a group of adolescents work up the courage to challenge the village eccentric about his unnaturally oversized key ring, or “Black and Tan,” in which a couple struggling with infertility adopt a puppy from a kennel that later doesn’t seem to exist, are reminiscent of the darker fiction of Ray Bradbury (think “Zero Hour” or “The Veldt”) as well as Bradbury’s disarming, “aw shucks” charm about porch swings and berry picking that sets readers up for the sucker punch (Proctor is clearly a fan of blackberries and berry picking, too, not to mention sucker punches–there are more than a few here!)

Proctor uses language that is sparce, precise, and also lyrical, an approach that especially shines in her hard-boiled crime fiction, a genre Proctor says taught her “the value of a well-chosen word, a short sentence, a piece of visual exposition.” The stories “Bag Limit,” about a family with a history of extra-judicial solutions to problems who take the long way round to punishing those who transgress against them, and “Texas Two-Step,” about brothers who rely on each other–for anything–without having to ask, are both crackling examples of noirish economy.

Originally from Belgium, Proctor is a Texan transplant who captures the sultry speech patterns and sunsets of her adopted home with delightful insight. One of my favorite stories in the collection is “The Hour of the Bat,” about a young woman torn between ambition and duty and trying to find a compromise to satisfy both. It reminded me in tone of the movie “Bus Stop,” and it has such a thoroughly Texan feel to it, you won’t need the mention of the state at the end to know where you were all along. Proctor is clearly an astute observer as well as storyteller, and she gets setting just right.

One of the joys of a collection like Family and Other Ailments that mixes stories of different genres is not knowing at the beginning of each tale what the “rules” of the new world are–are we in for a straight Philip Marlowe-style private eye case or will the house being watched end up looking back? In Proctor’s deft hands, the details arrive in due time.

– fin –

The Last Altruist, standalone by Richard J. Cass

Maine writer Richard J. Cass, best-known for his Boston Jazz Noir “Elder Darrow” murder mystery series, is increasingly making his mark as a short-story writer, writing gritty, hard-scrabble characters of South Boston and rural Maine with equal pathos. In addition, he’s currently publishing essays and a serialized novel one chapter at a time on his substack account. Adding to this prolific output, Cass has published his first stand-alone novel, The Last Altruist, a finalist for the 2023 Maine Literary Awards, which I picked up recently at the Maine Crime Wave mystery fiction conference.

The Last Altruist features all the common features of Cass’s fiction–rich descriptions of place, an attention to the character’s lives (the protagonist is a map maker, who we see not just at work but choosing his tools with a detail usually reserved for weapons and fight scenes in crime fiction), and a world peopled by imperfect people, some striving to do their best, others to Bogart it all at any cost.

I don’t know Cass’s personal situation, but his depiction of a mentally handicapped adult, a main character in the novel, was a breath of fresh air after too many years of Rain Man tropes, and it suggests Cass has first-hand experience in addition to his craft. This fully realized, adult man is given his own agency while remaining realistically limited and dependent on others for his well-being, and he reminded me of people I’ve known in similar life situations. The book is worth reading for that alone.

The Last Altruist is also a period piece, but, oddly, a period piece from the present, or at best the very recent past: the surreal years of the Covid-19 pandemic and perhaps the most corrupt era in American political history, where nearly half (but not quite half) of voters voluntarily pulled the lever for a man who represents the distillation of the vilest aspects of America particularly and humanity more generally, making us question both who our friends and family truly are but what kind of force our country actually is in the world. “The former guy’s” admiration for war criminals and his tendency to pardon them is a major plot point in The Last Altruist, with one such pardoned war criminal with a grudge against the map maker showing up early for reasons that unfold throughout the fast-paced story.

The years 2015-2021, and perhaps into 2022, are like World War II, not just because of the resurgence of Nazis but because of their cultural distinctiveness. Just as the Andrews Sisters defined the sound of WWII but were soon forgotten and cast aside for a public eager to put the memory and triggers of memory behind them, the masks, the graft, and the spectacle of the worst people in society being elevated to positions of impunity define the recent past, one Cass helps put in context through the eyes of a good, if flawed man, the titular “last altruist” who steps up to stand for something as those around him fall for everything.

It’s art like this and artists like Cass who will help us come to terms with the collective trauma the country went through from 8 Nov 2016 to 6 Jan 2021 and continues to go through as the guilty walk free among us, threatening to return like Jason Voorhess. Honest fiction can show us the truth in the fight against the gaslighting that would have us believe none of it ever happened.

Review of Kelly J. Ford’s THE HUNT

The background action of an Easter-egg quest in Kelly J. Ford’s latest crime novel, The Hunt, is a perfect distillation of a core theme through all Ford’s writing: the conflict between things lost and things found.

In her previous two mysteries, Cottonmouths and Real Bad Things, Arkansas native Ford focuses on things lost—friends, parents, security—deprivations that mostly boil down to vanished family. And as often as not, the reason for the character’s lack of these things is the intentional withholding of love and affection by others because of the protagonists’ inability or unwillingness to hide their sexuality. Ford’s books are “gay as fuck,” and delightfully so. If you have a problem with that, well, that’s even more reason for you to buckle in and read them, because the examples of child neglect, banishment, and homelessness often endured by Ford’s protags are among the most realistic elements in her books. Let’s face up to that, and change it.

In The Hunt, the focus shifts to things being sought, and things perhaps to be found. The small city of Presley, Arkansas, has been in the grip of an annual fever for almost twenty years around an annual Easter-egg hunt sponsored by the town’s quirky DJ. “The Hunt,” as it is known, involves finding a golden Easter egg the DJ hides anywhere in the radio station’s broadcast area in the weeks leading up to the holiday. Unfortunately, in every year it’s run, the Hunt has been accompanied by at least one mysterious or partially unexplained death. The prizes for finding the egg have never been significant enough to kill over, so what exactly is at play? Has the Hunt been victim to a series of accidents, is the Hunt an elaborate ruse or opportunity used to mask the actions of a serial killer, or is perhaps something even more sinister affecting the entire town? Such is the lore around the Hunt when it’s announced the usually meager prize for finding the egg has been raised to $50,000 for the 2023 hunt to make up for the time the hunt was shut down during Covid-19. This is a significant chunk of change for most people, but for Presley’s trailer-park denizens toiling inflation-devouring paycheck to paycheck, it’s potentially life-changing. Or life ending, depending on how stiff the competition gets. (Spoiler: it gets pretty stiff!)

Enter main character Nell Holcomb, sister of Garrett Holcomb, who died in the aftermath of the first Hunt in circumstances that…well, you’ll have to read about those grisly events. Nell had been in love with her brother’s girlfriend at the time of the first hunt and has blamed her own attitude and behavior for what happened to him ever since, sublimating her feelings of guilt into an obsession to find the egg, an obsession shared with most of the town, including friends and foes. Now raising her brother’s child, Nell tries to hang on to perspective and reason as the Easter moon draws nearer, but it’s going to be a struggle, not least because the $50K has convinced her 17-year-old nephew to start wandering through the woods in search of the prize himself, never mind who might be lurking.

Like all good mysteries, The Hunt is also about the social issues going on in the background, in this case, the thing that exiles hope most to find: family. In all her books, Ford’s heart-wrenching examples of abandonment ring especially true in her depictions of how outcasts, especially sexual and gender minorities whose families do not approve of who they are, are prone to losing or being driven from family and friends, and the effects of losing the security and identity that goes along with knowing you have either to rely on. Families by blood may have a head start on others, but it’s family found and built on love that endure. Ford’s gravel-road, blue-collar settings of factory floors and trailer parks show the dangers in navigating your own feared or maligned identity far away from safe spaces, where the potential for sudden violence is a constant factor in deciding how much of your true face and feelings to show the world.

More about The Hunt.

Kelly J. Ford website.

Buy it. Read it. Enjoy!

My debut novel: “Mink: Skinning Time in Wisconsin”

Happy May Day 2023! It’s sure to be one I never forget, because it’s Release Day for my debut novel, “Mink: Skinning Time in Wisconsin.”

“Mink” is a crime-fiction/horror mash-up set in 1993 that takes a deep dive into the brutal realities of fur farming, ecoterrorism, human drug testing, and the incipient right-wing militia movement that coalesced in the early days of the Clinton presidency. It also features a lot of 90s music.

In brief, the novel is the “story of what happens” when a penniless 23-year-old Gulf War Veteran, Kees VanSpyker, takes a job with the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) to infiltrate and reconnoiter a mink ranch they plan to raid in order to find out what happened to the last guy they sent there–who subsequently disappeared. “Mink” is both horror (the grim subject matter of fur farming makes it so) and crime fiction, with double-crosses stacking up and warning bells raising the hair on Kees’ skin as he gets closer to solving the mystery at the heart of the story. I suspect Badger Staters will recognize the darker side of their state as portrayed in what you might call “Hot Dish Noir.”

To say I’m excited for you to read this is the biggest of understatements. It’s available in e-book and print for now, with an audiobook version coming later in 2023 (so excited for that!) If you do read it, consider dropping a review on Goodreads or elsewhere–reviews are the lifeblood of indie publishing.

For now, I’ll finish this post with some feedback by a few generous people who already read “Mink” and generously blurbed for it. Thanks for reading!

“Everything about Mink is unexpected. The deep dive into mink farming, the trip back to the 90s. The prose is so elegant and evocative, which lulls you into a comfortable sense of nostalgia, only to rip that all away with an ending that leaves you breathless and shocked. A superb book by Zakariah Johnson, and I can’t wait to read more.”

—Amina Akhtar, author of KISMET

“Filled with a cadre of fascinating characters set within a unique premise soaked in Midwest and 90s nostalgia, Mink delivers intrigue, thrills, and heart all the way to the bloody end. You won’t want to stop reading once you’ve started.”

—Curtis Ippolito, author of Burying the Newspaper Man

“Clever and twisty, Mink, is a wild and visceral page-turner that will leave you clutching your hair and turning vegan.”

—Meagan Lucas, author of Songbirds and Stray Dogs and Here in the Dark

“Lean, mean, and clean in the taut storytelling, Mink delivers unflinchingly dark realism with an atmospheric crystal-clarity in Johnson’s deft hands. Mink smoothly serves up Midwestern madness and mayhem with an evocative eye that is sure to please readers who hunger for propulsive prose and all-too-human characters caught up in traps of their own design.”

—D.T. Neal, author of The Cursed Earth and The Thing in Yellow

“In the magical world of fiction, if T.C. Boyle and Robert Bloch had a love child, his name would be Zakariah Johnson. Johnson is a sharp-eyed writer with an ear attuned to the period in which he sets his story.”

—Jeff Esterholm, lifelong Badger-stater & author of The Effects of Urban Renewal on Mid-Century America and Other Stories

“Mink is a treasure of 90s pop-culture references and reaffirms what many of us Midwesterners know about Wisconsin: That state’s not just about beer, cheese, and the Packers—it’s a setting for deadly secrets. I enjoyed the hell out of this read!”

—Michelle Kubitz, mystery writer

Review: “Our Share of Night”

Evil is banal.

That’s the first thing to understand about Our Share of Night, Mariana Enríquez’s first novel translated into English. Evil is dull, its practitioners are cowards, its worshippers are insipid. Evil is lame. But oh what a magnet it is for the weak and delusional.

Mariana Enríquez is a contemporary Argentine writer whose first two short-story collections translated into English, Things We Lost in the Fire and The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, put her in the pantheon of the best short story writers in world literature, in pretty much every genre, but especially horror, both “soft” and “hard.” Her work is genuinely, intentionally disturbing, and in interviews she’s credited her lack of patience in fucking around with half measures to the reality of horror in the real world, in Argentina’s case, horrors still echoing loudly from the military junta that turned “disappeared” into a noun, aka The Disappeared. Speaking in the Guardian, she says:

I understand the [notion of] respect [for the dead]] but I don’t want to be complicit in any kind of silence; to be timid about horrifying things is dangerous too. Maybe I turn up the volume to 11 because of the genre I like to work in, but the genre puts a light on the real horror that gets lost in [a phrase like] “political violence”.

Interview in the Guardian, 1 Oct 2022

There is certainly nothing that gets lost in Our Share of Night, which depicts in great detail every imaginable horror and defilement, usually visited on the most innocent and without any come-uppance to the perpetrators, again, mirroring the amnesties we see for mass murder not just in Argentina but in most places around the globe where survivors have, at best, been forced to accept a tentative peace over any hope for justice. (I’m not going to give spoilers except to say if you have any triggers for anything, don’t read this book, because whatever your trigger is, it’s definitely in here.)

The particulars of the story follow a father, Juan Petersen, and his son, Gaspar, and the former’s efforts to save the latter from their family’s centuries-old death cult which worships an interdimensional evil called The Darkness. There are many nods to classic horror books and tropes here but much that is original, too. Both Petersens suffer from migraines, and the symptoms of migraines–its auras, confusion, and epilepsy-like debilitations–become characteristics of The Darkness itself. The phrase “black flowers that grow in the sky” is repeated as a harbinger of the darkness, and sounds very close to my mother’s descriptions of the onset of a migraine (she was a life-long sufferer). The chief villains of the story are the family elders, old women in this case, who have inherited a priestesshood of sorts from the demented practices of their families over several hundred years, years coinciding with European colonialism and its misappropriation of half-understood indigenous rituals. The “religion” of The Darkness is itself colonial-capitalist, sacrificing the many for the benefit of the few (with immortality as the prize).

A description of one of these matriarchs as believing her cruelty and amorality sets her apart as a sophisticate or Nietzschean ubermensch is a claim too many people both in the book and reality seem to believe; it certainly captures the mentality of those wealthy enough to have been deracinated from human connections by their wealth, another target of Enríquez’s derision. Similarly, a section depicting the forced hedonism practiced by young heirs of the world in London in the late 60s/early 70s is as pitch-perfect as it is pathetic. Enríquez brings the full strength of her gaze and descriptive powers to bear throughout the book’s almost 600 pages (yes, it’s very long.)

About the book’s length. 588 pages is a long book by any stretch, but it’s particularly long when dealing with depictions of highly detailed torture and suffering. Most of the sympathetic characters in the book are pansexual, with scenes of every sort of coupling, tender or otherwise, serving to bring some relief to the depictions of violence, but the violence dominates. If you are going to read it, this is not a book to linger on for multiple weeks or a month. Set aside the time to read it in a few days, then go out in the sunshine, preferably holding hands with a loved one. The length of the book mirrors its message that the ongoing system that permits evil (multiple systems of course) becomes worse and the system’s heirs more culpable for participating in it the longer these crimes against humanity and nature go on. But we all know that, even if we try to ignore it like a flitting shadow just beyond our peripheral vision. Enríquez twists our head to make us look.

If there is a weakness in the book, for me it was the “chosen one” trope–the father and son duo possess powers coveted by the cult but they do so out of the randomness of inherited power, like Luke Skywalker or that kid with the scar on his forehead. That said, there are many characters in the book whom Enríquez fully embroiders to more than make up for the lack of interest in the protagonists. And perhaps that’s part of the message too: evil is banal, but so are heroes. Save yourself. Be decent. Love.

Interview in Dead Darlings

Crime-writer Emily Ross, author of Half in Love with Death, interviewed me about my debut short-story collection, Egg on Her Face, in the Dead Darlings blog. Ross hails from Quincy, Massachusetts, where my 1629 Pilgrim western “Ambuscade on the Aptuxet Trail” story (included in Egg on Her Face) is set, starring the enigmatic, true-life anti-Pilgrim, Thomas Morton. We had a great time talking and I’ll never get over this endorsement from her:

These sharply observed stories focus on the struggle to survive in desolate sometimes surreal settings, bringing to mind the work of Jack London with a dash of Black Mirror.

Wow. Thanks, Emily! Read the whole interview here.

-Z.

The White Mountains in Winter

Until this weekend, we’ve had a miserably snowless winter in southern NH, but fortunately that has not been the case in the White Mountains. I live at about 60 feet in elevation on the Seacoast, while the Whites go up to over 6,000 ft, in the case of Mount Washington, with numerous others exceeding 5,000. The White Mountains are famously home to “the worst weather in the world,” which, when considering how benign New England is in general, seems like hyperbole. It is not. In early February of this year, Mount Washington set the record for the lowest wind chill ever recorded in North America: -108 F. Yes, that’s MINUS 108.

I was not hiking that day, nor was anyone else with half a brain. But I did go out on warmer days in January and February to get my winter fix and literally get the cobwebs out of my wool pants.

My younger two kids are both into winter camping, and I was able to make trips in January with one of them to go first an AMC hut (Carter Notch) and then to an RMC hut (Gray Knob), both in the heart of the White Mountains. When I first came to NH in 2009, I tried tent camping, but soon figured out that unless you spontaneously go on a good day, any planned trip will inevitably encounter rain, snow, sleet, wind or other miserable conditions that just aren’t worth it, so it’s best to stay in a hut or, failing that, one of the 3-sided shelters available for hikers. It’s just a better time.

Carter Notch hut is at the end of a roughly 4-mile trail that gradually rises from the trailhead along 19-mile creek. The final leg crosses a frozen pond that is one of the most beautiful spots you’ll ever see in the autumn and not bad in winter.

Final leg across frozen pond to Carter Notch Hut

Snowy trail up to Carter Notch, January 2023

On the other hand, Gray Knob, run by the RMC, is on the north face of Mount Adams, which rises roughly 4500 feet from its base to its peak of 5793 feet over a distance of only 4 miles. This is a challenging hike even in summer. In winter snow, the trail is actually easier on the knees than the relentless granite of the White Mountains in summer, but the elevation change comes with a major drop in temperature and frequently with winds topping 50 to 60 knots or more (much more at times–don’t go without checking the weather.)

It is still hiking, not technical climbing or even mountaineering, but I would say it is pushing the outer boundary of what most people would call a hike.

This is the AMC’s Madison Spring Hut at 4600 feet this February, nestled between the Mount Madison and Mount Adams peaks. It is closed in winter. Note the snow covering the door. Windy as hell this day.

This is me fiddling with my gloves while following my son along the string of cairns marking the trail on Mount Adams. We got within about 300 feet of the summit, but we were carrying our full overnight packs after having come up Valley Way and didn’t want to summit with so much gear. Winds were about 60 mph. The windbreaker was essential.

The RMC (Randolph Mountain Club) huts and shelters are a real joy to stay in during the winter. Unlike the few AMC that stay open, the RMC huts are partially HEATED, with a Franklin-type stove on the main floor below a dorm-style loft where guests share a single room using mats on the floor. It’s cozy, and it was full to capacity the weekend we were there since it was a brief window of good (only 0 degrees/-28 wind chill) weather between two major storm systems. There are many routes to get there, some extremely steep, so only very steep, all requiring crampons in winter. We came up Valley Way, then crossed across the north face of Adams and then descending via Abigail Adams back down into the krumholtz and embracing warmth of the treeline.

Exterior shot of Gray Knob Hut. Lovely spot!

This is a shot of the dorm room on the upper floor.

All in all, two great trips/treks, with some of the rarest clear views from Adams I’ve ever enjoined in more than 10 years hiking up there on the second one. (Adams is frequently cloudy, fogged in, or rainy.) The only downside is that being in my 50s now, I’ve switched roles with my kids: I used to have to wait for them and carry a greater portion of the load; now they do both for me. So far, I can still *almost* keep up with them, but it’s another incentive to stay on the treadmills, metaphorical and actual.

Rime ice on Mount Adams.

The sun seems to set on Adams at only 2 PM in the winter.

“Egg on Her Face,” Debut Short-story Collection

It’s been a whirlwind few months here, with news outstripping my time available to keep up with it. First up, after a decade of publishing short stories, my debut collection, “Egg on Her Face: Stories of Crime, Horror, and the Space in Between” was published in November 2022 by Alien Buddha Press. ABP has been a joy to work with, and I couldn’t be happier with the cover, which captures a scene from the “title track” of the 14-story collection:

Cover of “Egg on Her Face: Stories of Crime, Horror, and the Space in Between”

Feedback has been good so far. I have many more than 14 stories, and it was hard to fight the urge to put more of them into the collection, but I wanted the book to have a cohesive theme, in this case around the costs of staying true to yourself. This is reflected in the first story, “The Sculptor,” and to some degree in all the stories, like “One-armed and Dangerous,” “Between the Rocks and the Hard Place,” “Fireflies,” and one of my favorites to research, my 1629 Massachusetts western, “Ambuscade on the Aptuxet Trail,” about the enigmatic and fascinating true-life Thomas Morton and his free-love, pagan colony of Maremount that contended against the Pilgrims’ vision for our emerging nation.

When selecting the stories, this statement guided the decision: “You can escape from most traps as long as you’re willing to chew off the right limb.” Which I believe is true, but my protagonists face some pretty brutal choices.

– Interview with J.B. Stevens in Mystery Tribune

I talked more about the collection and writing in general with crime-writer and war poet J.B. Stevens in an interview published in Mystery Tribune, A Conversation with Zakariah Johnson, Author of Egg on Her Face. As I said to J.B., the guiding statement to deciding what would go in the book was: “You can escape from most traps as long as you’re willing to chew off the right limb.” Which I believe is true, though it will frequently kill you.

As noted, the reviews have been largely positive so far, so if you’re a short-story fan of either crime fiction or horror (plus westerns and scifi), I invite you to give it a look. I can’t resist ending on this review off Amazon, which is the sort of thing a writer gets made into a tattoo or at least a wall hanging, and which captures the tone of the book as well as anything I could say:

“A kaleidoscope of dystopian futures, wonders of frontier’s past, and the natural and supernatural world intertwined with horrific imagination.”

– Rob D. Smith, Amazon review

As a debut author, one thing I’ve discovered is that the idea of writing as solitary endeavor is a myth. Like they say, when you see a turtle on a post, it didn’t climb up there by itself. I couldn’t list all the writers, editors, friends, and family who have supported me along the way, not to mention those who took the time out to read and give feedback on stories before they were published or reviews after they were published. I thanked as many as I could in the acknowledgments, and I can only hope to repay the generosity I’ve enjoyed someday. Writers, it turns out, are people who love stories.

P.S. If you’re interested in getting a sample taste of my writing before jumping into a full collection, check out The Alien Buddha’s Full Moon Mashup. This is a four-story collection with novellas from NJ Gallegos, Mike McClelland, Emily Hughes, along with my story, “Egg on Her Face,” that provided my collection title. Reviews also good to date. I’d love to hear what you think.

And P.S.S. Here is the book trailer for “Egg on Her Face.” Enjoy!

Review: The Great American Coward, by Jay Bechtol

This past week I had the chance to read Jay Bechtol’s strangely affecting novel The Great American Coward. I say strangely affecting because it’s a quiet book, one with a slowly building structure, more like the original The Haunting of Hill House, that doesn’t start with a bang but for that very reason builds tension to an almost unbearable level as it reaches crescendo. Part sci-fi, part surrealist, part spy thriller; The Great American Coward reads like a mashup of The Matrix and Brazil if both had been written by Franz Kafka. Which is to say, I really enjoyed it.

“…if you are reading this, it means you will probably never find my body…”

– Myron Flynn, The Great American Coward

The titular character, the coward, is Myron Flynn, the only character whose inner life we are privy to, via his journal entries which embroider the book. He’s also the only named character, the others being named by their jobs or something they do, like hold a notebook. This is fitting because Myron has little interaction with other people, shuns them by choice, life-long habit, and now instinct.

Despite being “the coward” of the story, Myron, as are many meek people, has a strong sense of self and deep-rooted arrogance in what he believes are his own special skills—observation. He sees what other people fail to notice; trivial things, it’s true (he’s failed to notice the office secretary flirting with him for years), but, still, details that help him win awards in his meaningless job as an ad-copy writer for products no one needs in a company which has no real reason to exist other than that it does. (Perhaps a waste for superpowered observational skills, but who are we to judge?) The people at his work have jobs because those were the jobs they took when they needed one and then they stayed. It’s all a very prosaic existence, and though not even Myron would say it was a life he would have chosen, it all suddenly comes into clear focus as mattering when it’s threatened with existential non-existence:

Cover image for The Great American Coward. The alley shown here features prominently in the book.

On his way to work one day, Myron finds he is the only one on the sidewalk on his side of the street. He walks by a coffee shop, one that has been there for years, and notices and is in turn noticed by the people inside, who are…doing something that seems…off, somehow. For unknown reasons, the experience unnerves him. The next day, the coffee shop is gone, replaced by a bank with aged concrete that has obviously been in that spot for years. No one notices. Even Myron, with his special powers of observation, can barely convince himself that things are not, in fact, as they have always been, that something has changed, something has been lost. His observational skills lead him to discover the truth–that some group, perhaps aliens, perhaps the government, he doesn’t know–has appointed itself guardian of the timeline and is going about erasing “mistakes.” Not just tearing down buildings or the people in them, but erasing them from existence.

Myron’s world suddenly seems very important to him, as does saving it. However, his keen observational skills are in turn noticed by The Group, which instead of threatening him offers him a place in the organization: “Come erase with us.”

A day, perhaps a week earlier, Myron might have made a different choice, might have viewed these people differently, taken them at their word that they were doing right in the world. But Myron made another discovery the same day. Someone loves him, and her building–and existence–is next on the list to be disappeared.

“I don’t care what they think they are doing. Those two men are bad, Myron. They can’t

destroy people like that. They can’t make things disappear and really believe there are no

consequences…that everything is better because of what they do.”

– The Receptionist, The Great American Coward

The build-up to Myron finding his courage is incredibly tense, with author Jay Bechtol apparently following Hitchcock’s advice to torture the audience as long as possible. It’s a novel to remind us of the disappeared, too, the missing people from history, the people who didn’t win, and as a result, were not merely killed but erased from our consciousness–who were the last defenders of the breach in the wall when Byzantium fell, the last sailor struggling to restart the sinking sub that never resurfaced, the shipwreck survivor on the atoll that was never discovered? What does it mean to struggle, fail, and by failing to disappear from the view of human eyes? Most of us have more of an inkling of such a fate than we admit, especially late at night in an empty room lit solely by a digital clock reminding us of the relentless march of time. Myron and his new friend face the ultimate consequences: either to win the fight of their lives or to have their struggle not only be forgotten, but to never have been waged at all.

The Great American Coward is available in e-book and runs 200 pages, a quick and compelling read.