THE BLACK ALBUM: A Hollywood Horror Story Read Online Free

film-esque narrative. Carlton authored the
rest of this wicked high-octane cocktail you are about to imbibe. The following
chapters of this book are told from the perspective of the filmmaker, because,
in the mysterious case of "The Black Album," J.D. Loveless is the
Midnite Review.
     
    The Midnite Review of a Freak
King.

Chapter
One
     
    Flatlander
in Highlands
     
     
    Like any good horror story, this
one starts with a road trip.
    He awoke right as the road up the
mountain curved north and his car went south. Time bent at the exact instant
before he should have hit the worn guard rail, which would not hold at this
speed. He would have plummeted the full three thousand feet that he had just
ascended up the mountain so far, to his death. In the thick and knotted forest
below, the SUV would quickly be hidden in dense brush and foliage. If a
passerby didn't witness the accident firsthand and no one immediately noticed
the mangled metal wreckage of the guard rail, it would be days before the man’s
body would be found. Probably after the animal and insect population had its
way with his freshly rotting corpse. 
    The bending of the time continuum
gave him the added instant he needed to make a last second swerve back onto the
road. He fish-tailed twice and skidded roughly to a stop on the unpaved
shoulder. A beat later, the man was enveloped in a cloud of dirt kicked up by
his vehicle’s tires. Okay, so maybe time and space hadn't displaced. But it
sure felt like it to him. It was adrenaline that had made the world stop. The
fight or flight mechanism had kicked in deep inside his cerebral cortex, making
time seem to move at an altogether surreal pace. A pace where the whole world
went silent, except for the amplified beating of his own telltale heart. He sat
in his SUV on the side of the road and fought to catch his breath. His veins
were pounding in time with his heart. One internal symphony of terror, his
terror. The terror of J.D. Loveless: would be filmmaker. It took him five
minutes to catch his breath, for his hard-driving Techno beat to fade.
    Loveless caught sight of the
little pale yellow post-it note stuck to the dashboard and his fear diminished
a little more, replaced by the excitement that newness brings with it. The
post-it read “Lake Arrowhead 2day!” He was getting out of Los Angeles, his
adopted home and object of an ongoing love/hate relationship, for a sabbatical,
a self-imposed writer's retreat. Indefinitely. Actually Loveless no longer
designated himself a writer, even though he had written for a handful of
colorful independent film producers; colorful in this instance meaning crazy
muthafuckahs. The new distinction for Loveless was this: a writer writes. Period!
A director directs scripts that a writer writes. J.D. Loveless now saw himself
as a filmmaker. According to him, a filmmaker was a director who directs
screenplays that he himself writes. Or at least, he wanted to be a filmmaker.
    Loveless had a good friend named
Griffin who had a home up in the mountains roughly one hundred miles away from
sunny Los Angeles. He didn't go up there much and offered it to Loveless for a
six or seven month excursion free of rent if he maintained and fixed the place
up a little while living there. Griffin was indebted to the filmmaker for
getting him a key supporting role in a low budget feature film - Loveless knew
the casting director - and enticed him with tales of tranquility and serenity
in a setting of lush nature. Seeing as how the five-day-or-quit notice on the
filmmaker’s apartment door was four days old, he took his friend up on the
offer.
    Besides, Loveless wanted to
write. More than that, Loveless wanted to write a screenplay that he could
direct. The would-be filmmaker only had two hurdles. One: he had no idea what
he was going to write about. Two: Loveless didn't know where he was going to
get the money to turn a bunch of words on a page into a tangible motion
picture. Artistic creativity meets