It's 1969. America is on the moon. The Vietnam War is dividing the country. 

And in the Alabama swamps, the Cryman stirs.

Thirteen-year-old Aaron is the first to see it, and the first to suffer its wrath. He must
choose between the Thorny Path of lust and vengeance or the Dark Path of eternal
loneliness. Either way, his life is forfeit, and he is desperate to save his beloved
sister and friends from a similar fate. But the increasing spiral of violence and horror
threatens to engulf them all. 

No one gets out of this unscathed. Only a few get out alive. 



                                                       





It’s summer, 1965. School's out and Butch's birthday is in a few weeks.          
Perfect; three months of freeze tag, hide and seek and riding his bike
way past dark. Well, maybe not completely perfect — Frank Vaughn,
a classmate, is beaten to death by his crazy mother for leaving a
report card at school. On top of that, Dad is touchier than ever
and Mom sadder, so best to hide out next door with his best friend
Tommy reading X-Men and hoping for that birthday GI Joe.


  But in one night, Butch's summer explodes and he’s now riding
  across a turbulent and changing Dixie in a white Rambler
  station wagon, at the mercy of a manic depressive and wildly
  violent Dad. Like a crewman on Ulysses' ship, Butch
  encounters a one-eyed evil grandfather, a 12-year-old Siren, 
  the lotus-eaters of Alabama…and Frank Vaughn. If Butch ever
  sees his beloved sister, Cindy, again, it'll be a miracle. If he's
  alive at the end of the summer, it'll be a bigger one.

  A dark version of "The Wonder Years," Frank Vaughn Killed
  by his Mom is The Great Santini written by Homer,
  careening through a coarse world of racism, adultery,
  abandonment, and even the occasional hope.



        
    


         



“I bought the house.”

Art Deats does not have to ask which one. His brother, Butch, has been fixated on their
childhood home deep in the swamps of lower Alabama ever since they fled the place in terror 
forty years  ago. Has Butch lost his mind? The house is haunted. Let it rot!

“I want you to come down here and help me fix it up.”

Butch, do not do this. Do not wake the dead.

Against his better judgment, Art leaves his safe and predictable New Jersey life to help
his brother restore the place. While he struggles to make the house livable again, Art’s
long suppressed memories are triggered and he uncovers terrible secrets about
his family. And that something more than ghosts haunts the place.

Southern Gothic is the sequel to Frank Vaughn Killed by his Mom.

A surreal quest to find the annoyingly elusive Don
takes Butch to places better left alone.
​

What is Butch thinking? He joined the Air Force to escape New Jersey and now, look, one day out of basic training and he's tooling around the Pine Barrens in his Mom's car searching for his best friend, Don. It's like he never left. And he's still in big trouble: Pee Sea, the most notorious drug dealer in the state wants his head on a pike; his stepfather wants the car back and Butch gone; and his old girlfriend, April, wants to personally remove any body parts Pee Sea doesn't. If Butch could just find Don, then they could spend one last crazy night running the shore and the lakes and the mysterious, otherworldly swamplands before Butch has to report in. If he could just find him…
 
Looking for Don is a Bruce Springsteen album, a wild ride through 1970's south Jersey as Butch runs into bike gangs, Pineys, the Jersey Devil… and even an old ghost from his childhood.
 
Looking for Don is the third novel of the Frank Vaughn trilogy.
                                                                                                                                      
 

Otto Boteman suffers a massive heart attack and wakes up in a strange, jeweled city filled with beautiful people, a mesmerizing sky defying all physics, and what looks suspiciously like his first car. Seeking answers, Otto has a disturbing encounter with a murdered childhood friend and is assured by some kind of angel bureaucrat that this is Heaven, but God is not here so don’t bother looking. No God? Can’t be Heaven, then, despite the best danishes he’s ever eaten and residence in a pretty nice condo (replete with tailored suits and HBO). Maybe he’s not even dead, just comatose. But then he meets Claudia, a 5th Century beauty running an Irish pub, who tells him about a group of malcontents building a rocket ship in the far desert. Their mission? Find God. So begins Otto’s journey across a fabulous world peopled with the likes of Doc Holliday, Prester John, and a Mongol horde led by an accountant from West Kankakee, Illinois. Drawing the wrath of a frenzied, suit-wearing army of angels (or demons, can’t tell), Otto discovers that launching the ship just might end the eternal struggle between good and evil.                                                                          The epic journey continues... While the battle rages around the launch gantry, Otto Boteman hustles aboard as the ship lifts off. Now a useless stowaway, Otto must constantly prove his worth or get shown the airlock door. But a stunning encounter at the Pearly Gates changes the entire purpose of the ship, and Otto, along with the rest of the crew, must band together to survive a universe far more terrifying than any of them imagined.                       The ship is gone. So is the crew. Only Otto Boteman remains. Living in a log cabin in a beautiful valley on a planet of two suns and two moons, every dog of his childhood in attendance, every need provided, Otto whiles away the days in peace and silence. It seems like Heaven. Except, God is not here. No one is. His doubts growing, Otto goes back to the wreckage of the ship seeking…something. What, he’s not sure. But his discovery of a relic within the ship’s remains sets in motion a series of cataclysms that drive Otto across an ever changing world where he confronts old enemies, half-forgotten myths, and the very nature of existence. And maybe, God Himself.

The Twin Towers are still smoldering when those odd little anthrax letters show up, killing a few people here and there. Some nutcase, everyone thinks, but it’s not – it’s a setup, a precursor to a massive biological attack that leaves the Northeast a quarantined wasteland. Campus policeman John Rashkil, trapped inside the Zone, chooses to keep doing his job, adding judge and executioner to his resume. He builds a jury-rigged life from what he can salvage and tries to help his teenage son survive this new, Byzantine America. But a growing sense of futility shatters his confidence, and he is unprepared when a rabble army seeks to break quarantine and pour into the uninfected lands. Based on an Irish legend of the same name, Partholon is a brutal look at how the just and the civilized respond to anarchy.

                                                                              

Five years after the events of Partholon, a juggernaut Red Armyis bearing down on what's left of the isolated, undermanned, and under-equipped 1st US Combined Forces, nicknamed the Ghosts. Victory is assured; America will fall. But Sergeant Collier Rashkil and his lover, the beautiful and ruthless Major Rosa Arce, are Ghosts. And Ghosts don't die.

Trapped in the swamplands of south Jersey, the Ghosts maintain a thin line of defense, their survival dependent on the intelligence that Rosa and Collier provide. But a reconnasisance mission goes very, very wrong, and Rosa discovers there is a traitor in their midst, one willing to sacrifice all their lives for a flawed Utopian vision.

Based on an Irish legend, Tu'an is a story of brutal combat, of survival, betrayal, and a love that no enemy, no war, not even death, can end.
 

                                                                                                                 
  


  Twenty years after Tu’an, Collier Rashkil runs an intelligence network out of an underground church in the northern Shenandoah Valley. A hundred miles or so south, Henry Price runs a smuggling ring. Neither is aware the other survived the horrific last stand of the Ghosts. Life is hard: Collier is proscribed; Henry is one step ahead of arrest and execution, yet both have a measure of contentment. But then an old enemy confronts Collier as a new enemy attacks Henry, and a war already lost threatens to reignite and finish them, their families, and what’s left of the country.

                                                                                                                                    

        

Ten tales of the mundane, of a universe askew, where things are slightly off:

1. The Last Man in the World Explains All: double check your math.
2. Ghost Woods: shot an arrow into the air, and where it landed...
3. Invisibility: don't attract attention. Just don't.
4. Not With a Bang: this is how the world ends.
5. Do-Over: the problem with time travel is you.
6. An Unfortunate Choice of Words: Aliens. Man, they just don't get it.
7. The World Without Souls: not the most pleasant of places.
8. Reparations: my, how things change.
9. Inherit the Earth: a race, or an idea?
10. An Inappropriate Response: Humans. Man, they just don't get it.



 

• The Moonlight in Genevieve's Eyes: unrequited love. Tragic. Just tragic.
• Choice: second chances are rare. Especially when you work for a vampire.
• The Flowers in Mr. Williams' Garden: neighborhood watch, ghost style.
• Cistern: zombies are horrible, until they hire you.
• The Elvish Woman: lovers who steal your soul. Literally.
• The Trumpet Inside the Warehouse: no one can hear you scream.
• King of the Bears: be victorious, or be dinner.
• Angel Eyes: man's best friend, when you forget your cross and garlic.
• The Absence of Land: sell the farm, pay the consequences.
• Face to Face: Lane really, really wants to meet his birth mother.

So, grab a crucifix, a shotgun, and come on in. But, leave a clearly marked trail. It's dark in here.