You don’t associate Ray Garton with detective fiction, but you’re in for a special treat: Garton out-Spillanes Mickey Spillane with this gutty private eye novel with an irresistibly intriguing title, Murder Was My Alibi

“She walked into my office smelling like a meadow of flowers and looking like one long night of trouble.”

Myron Foote is a private detective on the wrong side of the tracks who doesn’t like to be on the receiving end of violence but is sometimes a little too quick to hand it out to others. From his dumpy little office on the edge of the red light district, he works bottom-of-the-barrel divorce cases…until a gorgeous redhead walks into his life and offers him $105,000 to pose as her uncle Percy. It sounds simple. Too simple. But who could turn down that kind of money? Or that kind of redhead?

The job takes him down a dark path littered with lies and secrets, blackmail and murder…a path that leads straight into Cynthia Thacketer’s arms…and into a deadly trap. Soon, all that stands between Foote and life in prison is an alibi he cannot use.

Ray Garton keeps the pace brisk and the action intense in this hard-boiled modern noir that will have you guessing until the final gunshot.

Can’t get enough Ray Garton noir?  Visit his author page for a banquet of dark fiction.

“To grandmother’s house we go” may bring a sentimental tear to most eyes, but for Ray Garton it brings a flood of disturbing memories that he has memorialized in a blog. If you seek a bracing antidote to the cloying cliches of holiday recollections and are curious to know what makes horror writers different (read strange), here’s an excerpt from Garton’s blog.

“Granny and Papa lived in a trailer park. Over the years, there have been a lot of trailers in my family on both sides. A lot. You can follow that to whatever conclusion you like … and you’ll probably be right. As a boy, I looked forward to visiting to Granny and Papa’s trailer. They had a dog named Nipper who was always on a leash tied to a tree in the front yard. Nipper was a big dog with long legs and a coat of tightly curled white hair. I’m not sure what kind of dog he was – he was rather odd looking and reminded me of a horse. Whenever we visited Granny and Papa, Nipper got very excited, and when he got excited, it seemed he looked directly at me. He didn’t exactly bark, but he made happy whining and yelping sounds as he rose up on his hind legs, waving his forelegs at me as if beckoning me to come play. I always fell for it. I was like Charlie Brown every time Lucy held the football for him to kick. No matter how many times I’d gone through the routine before, no matter how many times it always ended the same way, when I saw Nipper waving at me with his front paws and making those excited sounds, I couldn’t resist. I rushed toward him, a chubby little boy eager to play with a happy dog. And each and every time, Nipper would wait until I was just close enough, and then he would drop down on all fours, lower his head and the fires of hell would flare up in that dog’s eyes as his black lips peeled back over yellowed fangs and a sinister growl rumbled up from subterranean depths to let me know that if I took one step closer – C’mon, kid, one more step, just one more, c’mon – he would take great delight in gnawing on my windpipe while I thrashed around in the final convulsions of my life. Then I would spin around and run away in terror.

“I never learned.”

You can read it in its entirety here, and while you’re at it you can read his Christmas Greeting from an Atheist.

If you’d like learn how a nasty childhood becomes the stuff of fiction, visit Ray Garton’s E-Reads author page and sample some of his books. Not sure which one to start with? Can’t go wrong with Live Girls.

Richard Curtis

Ray Garton’s horror/suspense novel  The Girl in the Basement is about a young, abused foster boy who finally ends up in a decent home.  But the hero is not exactly Charles Dickens’s Pip, and there is something disturbingly indecent going on in this “decent” home.

15-year-old Ryan Kettering has spent his young life in a series of mostly abusive foster homes. But his luck has changed. Now he’s in the Preston house, where he has a budding romance with fellow foster child Lyssa. But something strange is going on in the basement.

Maddy is a slow nine-year-old girl who is kept in the basement. Sometimes she talks in a gravelly adult voice. Sometimes she seems to know things about others that she couldn’t possibly know…and predicts things that always come true. And sometimes people from the government come by to spend time with Maddy down in the basement.

Maybe Ryan’s luck hasn’t changed as much as he thinks.

Originally published in 1988, Horror Grand Master Ray Garton’s Crucifax (along with his stunning debut novel Live Girls) is regarded as a classic of the “splatterpunk” movement in horror fiction. Garton depicts teenage boredom, small-town isolation, incest, drug abuse and over-the-top violence. In Crucifax he has created a modern remake of the Pied Piper story with the sinister Mace seducing mixed-up kids with his siren song of pleasure, power and indulgence, all leading to a horrifically unsettling climax of death and destruction. And let’s not forget the rat-like things that do the piper’s bidding…

E-Reads is in the process of rereleasing the complete works of this master of the horror genre, plus some other works that take his readers far, far away from genre fiction. Visit his author page for a complete list.

RC

With publication of The Loveliest Dead E-Reads continues its program of reissues of horror novels by Grand Master Ray Garton.

In this novel Garton is at the top of his macabre form. The “loveliest dead” are far from lovely but they are definitely dead and making life hell for the living. Following a sequence of increasingly dire personal tragedies, culminating in the unexplained death of their four-year-old son, Josh, Jenna and David Kella plan to make a new start of their lives on the old family homestead they’ve inherited just outside Eureka, California with their surviving son Miles. What they discover, though, is a nightmare. Ghostly children play on the backyard swings and vanish abruptly. In a cruel and maddening irony, one of the child ghosts resembles their dead son Josh. The horrors pile up as psychics, Ouija boards and poltergeists drive the couple to the borders of madness and terror.

Ray Garton is the author of close to sixty books of which perhaps the best known is Bram Stoker nominee Live Girls. E-Reads has recently released his widely-praised novel Sex and Violence in Hollywood, bringing to 5 the Garton books in our program. We have no intention of stopping there.
RC

Don’t know what a lot lizard is? You obviously haven’t been hanging around truck stops. And you may never want to go near one after you read Ray Garton’s Lot Lizards

A “lot lizard” is a female hooker who works highway truck stops as her territory. When trucker Bill Ketter looks for a little relaxation and release, he discovers, too late, that he has bitten off more than he can chew. In fact, his lot lizard is the one that does the biting–she is a vampire, one of number who move from one truck stop to the next under the watchful and vicious eyes of the repulsive Carsey Brothers. Against his will, Bill becomes one of the undead. He follows the brothers and their cargo to another stop where he meets his ex-wife and children and Bill finds himself battling the vampires and their age-old leader for the life of his teenaged son.

Horror Grand Master Ray Garton has created another small masterpiece, contemporary adult horror at its most gruesome and loaded with extras doses of sex and gore. The confined setting creates a perfect claustrophobic stage for the story and the hellaciously quick pace never lets the action slow down.

The cruelest punishment that can be inflicted on any book is neglect. And to neglect a great book is tantamount to a crime. With publication of Ray Garton’s masterpiece Sex and Violence in Hollywood we have the opportunity to reverse a terrible wrong.

“Great” is a common hyperbole used by publishing people to pitch books, and its overuse has cheapened the word. For that reason I invite you to link to the page of dazzling reviews heaped on the book when it was published in a limited edition by Subterranean Press. There you will see “great” used five times, so you don’t need to take my word for it.

You won’t see the word “Masterpiece” used in those reviews. That one is mine. Sex and Violence in Hollywood is one of the finest novels I have ever been privileged to represent. The book is horrifying, but why should that come as a surprise? Garton, a Horror Writers of America Grand Master as well as a Bram Stoker nominee for his horror novel Live Girls (also an E-Reads book), is indeed a master of the genre. But Sex and Violence in Hollywood is so appalling it completely transcends the horror genre.

Here are some excerpts from other reviews:

• I would advise you to not begin reading this book right before you have something important scheduled, such as performing surgery, or need to get anything constructive done, because you will NOT be able to put it down once you’ve started. Rusty Martin, Barnesandnoble.com
• It is almost impossible to put down!… I’ve already awakened my husband a couple times laughing out loud. The scenes are so vivid I can almost touch them. This is a great book! Horrornet.com
• You are in for one mean, hard, vicious ride; it’s about as searing a satire as you’re likely to encounter. I defy anyone to survive the last 50 pages unshaken. Gary Braunbeck, (Gorezone.com)
• I think this is hands down the best things you’ve ever written. It quickly passed Live Girls, Dark Channel and all my other favorites. And that ending…Damn! Horrornet.com
• Sex and Violence in Hollywood is a realistic, non-supernatural melodrama of greed, murder, and twisted family relations that offers exactly what the plainspoken title promises….It’s a kinetic, plot-driven novel filled with cliffhangers, betrayals, unexpected developments, and moments of stark, disturbing violence. It’s also, at times, a very funny book, filled with cogent observations of an insular, narcissistic society. Sex and Violence possesses wit, energy, and a relentless momentum that carries the narrative steadily forward. At its best, Garton’s latest has the raw, in-your-face power of a Quentin Tarrantino film. It comes highly recommended to anyone looking for a nasty, colorful, high adrenalin good time. Bill Sheehan , Locus

What is Sex and Violence in Hollywood about? Adam Julian, son of a Hollywood screenwriter, has a life many would kill for… and some would kill to keep. He’s tangled in a web of forced sex, coerced into robbery, and it’s only a short step to killing as a choice. At the center of the book is a sensational murder trial (which oddly resembles the O.J. Simpson case). Drenched in the glamor and sleaze of highline and lowlife Hollywood, Garton’s take on the criminal justice system, turned inside out and upside down by showbiz at its best and worst, is a panorama of crime, corruption and violence.

You can purchase Sex and Violence in Hollywood as either an e-book or a trade paperback.

Richard Curtis