Robert Dunbar's Blog - Posts Tagged "pines"
The critics (bless them)
Promoting a book from the tiniest of micropublishers has not been the easiest thing I've ever attempted, but quite a number of reviewers and editors have already been very generous and encouraging.
I can't resist sharing some of my favorite quotes:
Martyrs & Monsters
by Robert Dunbar
"A masterpiece … disturbingly satisfying."
DARK SCRIBE MAGAZINE
"Substantial amounts of panache and poetic insight."
CEMETERY DANCE
"A milestone of modern horror."
THE BLACK GLOVE
"Sure to satisfy lovers of both horror and literary fiction."
SHROUD MAGAZINE
"Unnervingly erotic. This is what horror does best."
HELLNOTES
"Modern horror of the first order."
HIGHLANDER BOOK REVIEWS
"This collection will challenge you, move you, and make you hold your breath."
OUTLAW REVIEWS
"Exquisite … dark fiction with a soul."
BOOKLOVE
"Provocative … vivid and visceral. We are supremely and alternately shocked and entertained, and strangely touched."
GUD MAGAZINE
"Stunning … a Nietzchean nightmare … gripping and innovative … deliciously wicked and beautifully wrought … wildly original and satisfying."
TOMB OF DARK DELIGHTS
"Searingly erotic … brilliantly chilling."
THE EDGE
"Not a book to read lightly. You won't forget it."
RAINBOW REVIEWS
"Sinister and macabre ... a scary, compelling ride through madness."
NIGHTS & WEEKENDS
"A refreshing exploration into several levels of myth … and a contemporary take on the traditional monsters of literature in a decidedly more human context."
THE EXAMINER
I can't resist sharing some of my favorite quotes:
Martyrs & Monstersby Robert Dunbar
"A masterpiece … disturbingly satisfying."
DARK SCRIBE MAGAZINE
"Substantial amounts of panache and poetic insight."
CEMETERY DANCE
"A milestone of modern horror."
THE BLACK GLOVE
"Sure to satisfy lovers of both horror and literary fiction."
SHROUD MAGAZINE
"Unnervingly erotic. This is what horror does best."
HELLNOTES
"Modern horror of the first order."
HIGHLANDER BOOK REVIEWS
"This collection will challenge you, move you, and make you hold your breath."
OUTLAW REVIEWS
"Exquisite … dark fiction with a soul."
BOOKLOVE
"Provocative … vivid and visceral. We are supremely and alternately shocked and entertained, and strangely touched."
GUD MAGAZINE
"Stunning … a Nietzchean nightmare … gripping and innovative … deliciously wicked and beautifully wrought … wildly original and satisfying."
TOMB OF DARK DELIGHTS
"Searingly erotic … brilliantly chilling."
THE EDGE
"Not a book to read lightly. You won't forget it."
RAINBOW REVIEWS
"Sinister and macabre ... a scary, compelling ride through madness."
NIGHTS & WEEKENDS
"A refreshing exploration into several levels of myth … and a contemporary take on the traditional monsters of literature in a decidedly more human context."
THE EXAMINER
Out on THE STREETS
Just as there are broken people, there are broken places on this earth.
Some have always been broken.
All cities have such neighborhoods at their edges, and this city is all edges … block after block of bleakly hopeless outskirts.
People don’t bury dead cities. They abandon them. They abandon them to the poorest of the poor, to the lost and the doomed.
A few streetlights may still glimmer, but the life of this city ebbed long ago. It might resemble the site of some cataclysm or look as though chains of time had tightened, crushing it; yet it is not truly old, not as such things are measured. No true cataclysm occurred, and the extinct civilization that built it staggers on, even now, unaware of its own demise.
Rot phosphoresces where wounds are deepest, and here decay is well advanced, but some form of life festers still. Things scurry. They twitch in shadows. They splash through flooded alleys and lurk along the docks. And they travel in packs.
~ from the Prologue to THE STREETS
Talk about long, strange trips. I can remember starting to write THE PINES the way one might recall a past life experience. Could that really have been me? Could I really have been that young? (Ever?) I remember beginning it as a sort of parody of a horror novel, lampooning everything I thought was wrong with the genre. (Because no one understands everything about everything the way a twenty-year-old understands everything about everything.) Then the strangest thing happened.
I started to get sucked in.
Before reaching the end, I swear, I inhabited that moldering old house in the pine barrens to a more intense degree than I inhabited my own horrible apartment in that terrible neighborhood. (Has anybody here read my collection Martyrs and Monsters? Remember the story GETTING WET? Imagine if Tim dragged himself in from the streets every night and then sat up till dawn working on a novel. Imagine if Con became jealous of it, jealous enough to break a few of Tim’s bones, then throw the manuscript out a window. Picture Tim, barely able to stand, scrambling around in the street, gathering pages. Better still, don't imagine it. I've spent my adult life trying to block it out.) Then an even stranger thing happened: a publisher wanted the novel.
Seriously? I thought I was having a psychotic break. (All right, so I’m not ruling that out.) Suddenly, there was this actual book with my name on the cover. Soon a handful of critics championed it, and it began to snowball.
Jesus. Who the hell expected that?
It’s a different world now, and I’m a different person. But I think the seeds of myself were planted on all those late nights – still the most vivid and terrifying chapter of my life – as I fought to realize my vision of that sad, evil house and the people trapped within.
Horror fans were more innocent then, I think. A lot of folks were sort of shocked by my work. Even today, readers are put off by the fact that my characters are the walking wounded: difficult souls in bad situations. Crippled (maybe) but groping toward the light, they learn to accept themselves, and they learn to love… and to fight for the people they love, to protect them.
To save them.
Amazing – the things we learn as we go along (if we live long enough). I couldn’t have realized it at the time, but THE PINES was my story, my life story, I mean. It might have been a horror novel, full of fire and monsters, but it was, at least metaphorically, about the world I was learning to live in, about the self I was learning to inhabit.
God, I hate insight.
Poor Matty: ten years old and wandering the woods, visions of blood filling his head, his only friend a phantom voice in the trees. Such a singular image. The amazing thing was how many people found that this book spoke to them. At any rate, it amazed me.
I remember that readers kept asking when the sequel would be coming out. “Are you nuts?” I would politely inquire. (I’ve always been good with people.) No way, I insisted – there would be no sequel. Besides… I encountered so many detours. Poetry and theater. Articles to write. Then radio and even, gods help me, television. But, one day, as though from nowhere, I found myself writing THE SHORE.
One of the characters from THE PINES became central to the plot of THE SHORE. (Others entered the story only tangentially.) Still blighted. And struggling. But still trying to grow.
This was another, very different sort of vision: hushed and snowbound. From the start, I wanted to construct it like a British mystery, full of complex characters in an isolated environment, and – at the heart – almost apocalyptically intense.
“Apocalyptic” became sort of a key concept. (That hurricane at the end…) I never dreamed there would someday be a third volume. Sometimes you just can’t stop these things.
They rise.
People who read my novella Wood, may find they recognize some of the atmosphere of THE STREETS, at least, some of the milder aspects. (The characters from WOOD would never survive THE STREETS.) And there may be echoes of my other books as well. In THE STREETS, the teenage inmates of The Whitman Center, a nearly derelict asylum on the outskirts of Camden, New Jersey, are the spiritual siblings of the students at the Decatur Institute in Willy. But I did something else as well. I brought in all of the (surviving) characters from both THE PINES and THE SHORE for this ultimate confrontation with the monsters that have dominated their lives.
The Pines
The Shore
THE STREETS
Legends linger … in the dark places of this earth.
In a desolate city, as ravaged and dangerous as any post-Apocalyptic wasteland, a ragtag gang of demon hunters must battle to save humankind itself. But is mankind worth saving?
THE STREETS is the final installment of THE PINES TRILOGY:
Part I
THE PINES
An evil force draws ever nearer to the farmhouse where a lonely woman struggles to raise her strange, disturbed son.
“Dark, foreboding, menacing, eerie … seductive.” ~ The Philadelphia Inquirer
“Nor only a superb thriller but a masterpiece of literature.” ~ Delaware Valley Magazine
“Astounding ... a brooding tale told with haunting grace ... a work of art.” ~ Shroud Magazine
Part II
THE SHORE
As a winter storm tightens its grip on a half-deserted town, the locals cower from more than just the pounding waves.
“A classic of modern horror.” ~ Weird New Jersey
“Full of chilling surprises.” ~ Cemetery Dance Magazine
“This intense and wholly original novel is one of the best to come out of the horror genre in years.” ~ Dark Scribe Magazine
Part III
THE STREETS
Do the streets offer salvation? Or death?
“THE STREETS is like ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST, shot directly into your veins like a speedball.”
~ Greg F. Gifune, author of THE BLEEDING SEASON
“Robert Dunbar has the unique personal vision, command of language, and atmospheric style to enrapture you in the wildest, deepest nightmare.”
~ Tom Piccirilli, author of THE LAST KIND WORDS
* * *
It’s exciting, waiting to see how people will respond to a new book. THE STREETS is available both in paperback and as an ebook. For more information, visit Uninvited Books:
http://www.uninvitedbooks.com/
Some have always been broken.
All cities have such neighborhoods at their edges, and this city is all edges … block after block of bleakly hopeless outskirts.
People don’t bury dead cities. They abandon them. They abandon them to the poorest of the poor, to the lost and the doomed.
A few streetlights may still glimmer, but the life of this city ebbed long ago. It might resemble the site of some cataclysm or look as though chains of time had tightened, crushing it; yet it is not truly old, not as such things are measured. No true cataclysm occurred, and the extinct civilization that built it staggers on, even now, unaware of its own demise.
Rot phosphoresces where wounds are deepest, and here decay is well advanced, but some form of life festers still. Things scurry. They twitch in shadows. They splash through flooded alleys and lurk along the docks. And they travel in packs.
~ from the Prologue to THE STREETS
Talk about long, strange trips. I can remember starting to write THE PINES the way one might recall a past life experience. Could that really have been me? Could I really have been that young? (Ever?) I remember beginning it as a sort of parody of a horror novel, lampooning everything I thought was wrong with the genre. (Because no one understands everything about everything the way a twenty-year-old understands everything about everything.) Then the strangest thing happened.
I started to get sucked in.
Before reaching the end, I swear, I inhabited that moldering old house in the pine barrens to a more intense degree than I inhabited my own horrible apartment in that terrible neighborhood. (Has anybody here read my collection Martyrs and Monsters? Remember the story GETTING WET? Imagine if Tim dragged himself in from the streets every night and then sat up till dawn working on a novel. Imagine if Con became jealous of it, jealous enough to break a few of Tim’s bones, then throw the manuscript out a window. Picture Tim, barely able to stand, scrambling around in the street, gathering pages. Better still, don't imagine it. I've spent my adult life trying to block it out.) Then an even stranger thing happened: a publisher wanted the novel.
Seriously? I thought I was having a psychotic break. (All right, so I’m not ruling that out.) Suddenly, there was this actual book with my name on the cover. Soon a handful of critics championed it, and it began to snowball.
Jesus. Who the hell expected that?
It’s a different world now, and I’m a different person. But I think the seeds of myself were planted on all those late nights – still the most vivid and terrifying chapter of my life – as I fought to realize my vision of that sad, evil house and the people trapped within.
Horror fans were more innocent then, I think. A lot of folks were sort of shocked by my work. Even today, readers are put off by the fact that my characters are the walking wounded: difficult souls in bad situations. Crippled (maybe) but groping toward the light, they learn to accept themselves, and they learn to love… and to fight for the people they love, to protect them.
To save them.
Amazing – the things we learn as we go along (if we live long enough). I couldn’t have realized it at the time, but THE PINES was my story, my life story, I mean. It might have been a horror novel, full of fire and monsters, but it was, at least metaphorically, about the world I was learning to live in, about the self I was learning to inhabit.
God, I hate insight.
Poor Matty: ten years old and wandering the woods, visions of blood filling his head, his only friend a phantom voice in the trees. Such a singular image. The amazing thing was how many people found that this book spoke to them. At any rate, it amazed me.
I remember that readers kept asking when the sequel would be coming out. “Are you nuts?” I would politely inquire. (I’ve always been good with people.) No way, I insisted – there would be no sequel. Besides… I encountered so many detours. Poetry and theater. Articles to write. Then radio and even, gods help me, television. But, one day, as though from nowhere, I found myself writing THE SHORE.
One of the characters from THE PINES became central to the plot of THE SHORE. (Others entered the story only tangentially.) Still blighted. And struggling. But still trying to grow.
This was another, very different sort of vision: hushed and snowbound. From the start, I wanted to construct it like a British mystery, full of complex characters in an isolated environment, and – at the heart – almost apocalyptically intense.
“Apocalyptic” became sort of a key concept. (That hurricane at the end…) I never dreamed there would someday be a third volume. Sometimes you just can’t stop these things.
They rise.
People who read my novella Wood, may find they recognize some of the atmosphere of THE STREETS, at least, some of the milder aspects. (The characters from WOOD would never survive THE STREETS.) And there may be echoes of my other books as well. In THE STREETS, the teenage inmates of The Whitman Center, a nearly derelict asylum on the outskirts of Camden, New Jersey, are the spiritual siblings of the students at the Decatur Institute in Willy. But I did something else as well. I brought in all of the (surviving) characters from both THE PINES and THE SHORE for this ultimate confrontation with the monsters that have dominated their lives.
The Pines
The Shore
THE STREETS
Legends linger … in the dark places of this earth.
In a desolate city, as ravaged and dangerous as any post-Apocalyptic wasteland, a ragtag gang of demon hunters must battle to save humankind itself. But is mankind worth saving?
THE STREETS is the final installment of THE PINES TRILOGY:
Part I
THE PINES
An evil force draws ever nearer to the farmhouse where a lonely woman struggles to raise her strange, disturbed son.
“Dark, foreboding, menacing, eerie … seductive.” ~ The Philadelphia Inquirer
“Nor only a superb thriller but a masterpiece of literature.” ~ Delaware Valley Magazine
“Astounding ... a brooding tale told with haunting grace ... a work of art.” ~ Shroud Magazine
Part II
THE SHORE
As a winter storm tightens its grip on a half-deserted town, the locals cower from more than just the pounding waves.
“A classic of modern horror.” ~ Weird New Jersey
“Full of chilling surprises.” ~ Cemetery Dance Magazine
“This intense and wholly original novel is one of the best to come out of the horror genre in years.” ~ Dark Scribe Magazine
Part III
THE STREETS
Do the streets offer salvation? Or death?
“THE STREETS is like ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST, shot directly into your veins like a speedball.”
~ Greg F. Gifune, author of THE BLEEDING SEASON
“Robert Dunbar has the unique personal vision, command of language, and atmospheric style to enrapture you in the wildest, deepest nightmare.”
~ Tom Piccirilli, author of THE LAST KIND WORDS
* * *
It’s exciting, waiting to see how people will respond to a new book. THE STREETS is available both in paperback and as an ebook. For more information, visit Uninvited Books:
http://www.uninvitedbooks.com/
