The Revenant Road Read Online Free

as menacing, Connie,” I said. “Some of them are as familiar to me as members of my own family.”
    Sawyer laughed.
    “Scary family,” she said.
    I smiled and counted royalty checks in my head.
    “Let’s talk about The River’s Edge, the story of a little girl who is abducted by her father and taken on a gruesome cross-country odyssey. Were you inspired by real events?”
    “Connie, I think all ideas spring from experience. Stories are like doorways into the human psyche. Sometimes they lead to something productive and entertaining, like The River’s Edge, sometimes they lead to the unknown; unexplored rooms in the mansions of the mind.”
    Sawyer smirked.
    “You must spend a lot of time in dark rooms.”   
    “I’d like to drag you into one sometime, Connie.”
    We chuckled invisible daggers at each other. Off camera, the assistant-director cleared his throat.
    “The best thing about those doors, Connie, seriously, is that you never know where they’ll take you. Some people find that scary. I take comfort in it.”
    “Some might call that that cold comfort,” Sawyer said.
    I made a mental note to call her for a date.
    “Sometimes that’s the only comfort we get, Connie.”
     
    * * * *
     
    My assistant, Carla, was waiting in the limo.
    “Yo, your publicist booked you on JUNO for next week,” Carla droned. “Oh, and your mother called. She said it was like, very important.”
    Carla Quintana might have been the cloned lesbian love-child of Jennifer Lopez and Fran Drescher. A proud “New Yorican,” Carla was sexy in the way that all girls from the Bronx are sexy. She was compact, with the body of a hip-hop video dancer and the mouth of a Mexican longshoreman.  
    “Call my mother,” I said. “Tell her I’m in the hospital: Minor stroke, some edema. Nothing serious, but no visitors.”
    Carla wearily punched in the number.
    “You are going straight to Hell,” she said.
    The limo driver chose that moment to speak.
    “Mr. Grudge, I just want to tell you that I loved Death and the Sorcerer.”
    “Thanks,” I said.
    “It’s my favorite book.”
    “Thank you so much.”
    The driver brightened, encouraged. His attention shifted from the road to the rear view mirror, seeking mine, searching for the click . I reached into the mini-bar and grabbed a tiny bottle of Jack Daniels while he rattled on.
    “I love the hardboiled private-eye stuff,” he said. “You do it better than a lot of these guys.”
    “Cheers,” I said, lifting the bottle, steeling myself.
    “You know, I write a little,” the driver said. “Mostly...”
    “Mostly Fantasy stuff,” I cut in. “Maybe a little Horror thrown in for good measure, right?”
    “That’s amazing,” the driver said. “See? I knew you and me was from the same tribe. How’d you know?”
    I shrugged and drained the too-small bottle in one gulp. It was an ordeal I’d endured at least twice daily since the publication of my first novel, Death and the Sorceror: fervent slobberings from semi-sentient tassels of the literary lunatic fringe that is Horror/Fantasy fiction today, a fringe that I despised.
    Let me explain: I hate Horror.
    Any form of “literature” that smacks of the supernatural makes my ass bone throb with disgust. I write mysteries, “Hardboiled” suspense stories. Violent? Yes. Dark? Certainly , but my novels are grounded in real-world horrors: serial killers, mad gunmen, and drunken detectives at the end of the line.
    But for reasons unfathomed by me at that time, my work had always appealed to the Horror geeks. This had proven to be a distinct handicap in an industry that sells thousands of Horror titles each year while ghettoizing even its most successful adherents, saddling them with the literary equivalent of a scarlet letter: the title of Horror Writer .
    No horror writer whose name doesn’t begin and end with ‘Stephen King’ is ever considered a real writer. They are laughed at, ridiculed and discounted by the