BLOOD CREEK
Voice-driven, part fictional memoir. An ode to what never was, in a place that really is.
Status- Seeking representation (Fall 2018)
Screenplay- Currently adapting into a feature-film screenplay.
Excerpt-
Blood Creek, a work of literary fiction, is a brutal and tender testament to a family’s capacity to endure hardship brought on by greed and betrayal. With echoes of Cormac McCarthy’s prose and tone similar to Winter’s Bone by Daniel Woodrell, Blood Creek presents a hard-hitting immersion into the mind of a man consumed by fear that he will not survive when his family, including his unborn child, need him most.
The Weavers stole nearly everything from Nick Lucas's family—their land, their money, but not their pride. Just before Thanksgiving, as winter pushes bleak and harsh, into the low mountains of central Pennsylvania, they murder his aunts, leaving the bodies in a creek. The Weavers have taken from his line for the last time. He vows to get it all back before they kill him too.
Hummingbird didn’t say a word, just reached out and grabbed my shoulder and held tight on to me, her other hand wrapped around the half-torn-off arm rest of the old F-150. We might have gone faster anyways if she was drivin’. She’s a good driver. And not stupid like I can get. I was probably gettin’ that way, mashin’ the throttle too close up. Her tiny hand dug in to my shoulder, and I backed off just barely. Another light caught us from the back. The seepin’ chill and darkness of dusk swallowed nearly everything. Whatever remained, outside of me and Hummingbird, was nothin more than a sweep of dim fallow light skimmin’ the gray strip of frost heaved and ruined road. The world we used to know slipped away in the rear view mirror in a near black blur.
FOUR DARK DAYS
Status- Revision process. Seeking representation fall 2019.
Mainstream/Upmarket Fiction.
Excerpt-
Four Dark Days is more than a border war story, it’s a devastating commentary on the wreckage arising from our greed and addictions—and the courage necessary to break free of them. A cross-cultural firestorm ignites between Native American Pueblo cultures, cartels, DEA and tribal police, a newspaper reporter, and corrupt city officials, when an uncontained war between two Mexican cartels rages across the Mexico/New Mexico Border.
Engulfed in the flames, eighteen year old Pure Water’s world is set on fire when her brother and father are kidnapped by cartel thugs in Santa Fe, New Mexico. When they do not return home from their jobs as day laborers, Pure Water goes to the last place she saw them, and asks a very unlucky man one question. The next morning the unlucky man is found dead, throat sliced, a newspaper jammed into his throat, and a warning tied around his neck. Two hours later, Pure Water is kidnapped and taken to a cartel run whorehouse on Black Hill Road, just above the border in Columbus, NM. And then she meets Mictecacihuatl, the Queen of Death, and her desperate fight to survive, long enough to save her brother and father begins.
Pure Water wanted to scream and push her away. Instead she dug her fingernails into her palm, felt the pain, and then relaxed her hands. The photos churned her stomach. She didn’t want to look at them. “I’ve seen enough.”
Mictecacihuatl watched her from the edge of the bed. “Keep looking. You don’t get out of this that easy.”
Pure Water turned, facing the door, about to cry. “Get out of this easy? You are so cruel. How am I getting out of this?”
“Keep looking. You need to see. Not only what’s happened in the past but what will happen to me, and you, if I don’t survive the next two days.”
Pure Water flipped through the next few photographs, trying to avoid actually seeing the body of the dead girl.
“Are you at the next girl yet?”
“I can’t tell. Yes, I think so. Darker hair?”
“Yes.”
“That’s Gabby. My only living sister. The Wasps have her.”
Pure Water could see that they were sisters. Wasps?”
“The cartel. The ones I am sending my men to fight.”
“And my family?”
“Yes. And your family.”
IN THE FIELDS
Status- Currently developing. (2018)
Mainstream/Upmarket Fiction.
Excerpt-
In The Fields is the sequel to Four Dark Days. Time has not moved more than one revolution of the earth from where the survivors of the battle on Black Hill Road moved on, either in hell, or still alive, to roam the earth and carry out the vendetta’s coming due.
He was no longer Pelo Rapado and he was no God; none existed here, and certainly none that would dare try to save him from her. Defenseless to alter the trajectory of his future, it fused itself upon that wall of living metal and transformed into just “a that”; a thin, futile vessel that existed within skin drawn tightly inwards between its bones reminiscent of an ancient leather military coat hanging forgotten on a museum wall. Just enough of its soul and memory remained to comprehend what it was before it came to this place.
It could not roam or speak and would do neither ever again. With its eyelids stretched tight around unblinking eyes absorbing those visions of a childhood that might have been his as they flitted across his slowly firing synapses. Somewhere deep inside the liquefying gray matter contained within its cranium they registered as lost moments of innocence. Along with them the lonely despair and comprehension that the failing chance of knowing those things again were lost forever to him and replaced any notion of hope and escape.