paranormal investigator

Tony Price: Confidential

Richard Schwindt’s monster hunting social worker, Tony Price, is one of the most recent additions to the ranks of the occult detective.

He features in 4 novellas:

Scarborough: Confidential

Sioux Lookout: Confidential

Kingston: Confidential

Ottawa: Confidential

The first 3 were collected in Tony Price: Confidential. The fourth novella is a prequel that takes place in Tony’s college days, where he discovers his gift for detecting evil.

Readers of this blog know I’m a big fan of Schwindt’s fiction, and his satires. His writing has gravitas, yet can be tongue in cheek. It is serious, yet laced with humor. It is often weird and spooky and over the top, yet he never loses you. You willingly continue to suspend disbelief, because you just have to see what happens next.

And the Tony Price stories are no different. Monster hunting was never so scary — or so fun.

We read non-fiction to be informed, to learn something. We read fiction primarily to be entertained. To lose ourselves in something not of our humdrum lives. Fiction is escapist entertainment. A good book takes us out of our everyday routine and plunks us down in another world.

Sure, we know we are reading a story, something somebody made up. It is the storyteller’s job to make us think otherwise. To help us make believe the story is true.

Richard Schwindt excels at the art of make believe. The Scarborough, the Sioux Lookout, the Kingston, the Ottawa of Mr Schwindt, while real places, are not the places of this reality. They are make believe.

Yet when he weaves his magic, we willing believe that his made up world is the real world. That is the artistry of a master storyteller at work.

Do you want to fight monsters? Do you want to beat supernatural bullies and make the playground of our world safe again?

Then join forces with Tony Price — monster buster extraordinaire.

Comments are always welcome. And until next time, happy reading!

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Investigators of the Paranormal

Fear is one of our oldest emotions — if not the oldest. And fear of the unknown is one of our greatest fears.

I don’t know what I don’t know, and that lack of knowing scares us. It is primal, that fear of the unknown.

Fear, playing on our fears, is the stock in trade of the writer of the macabre. Those spinners of stories that parade our fears before us and scare us to death — and we love it.

For all of our façade of sophistication, biologically speaking we are no different than our ancestors from 300,000 years ago. We may no longer be afraid of thunder and lightning, and we may have outgrown our fear of what’s under our beds — we are, however, still controlled by our fears.

Just look at the nightly news. Listen to David Muir’s tone of voice. He’s playing into our fears. And how often do we say, “I’m afraid…” — no matter the context?

Is it any wonder that the tale of terror, the horror story, has never lost its appeal with readers?

Today, interest in the paranormal — our modern term for what used to be called the supernatural and the occult — is hot. Genre fiction has pretty much a paranormal version of every genre. Some of it’s silly, and some of it is pretty doggone scary.

Paranormal fiction has made quite a few of its writers a boatload of money. And while much of the paranormal genre fiction is formulaic trope-filled tripe, some of it is quite good.

When I conceived of my Pierce Mostyn Paranormal Investigations series, I wanted something that moved in the world of the Cthulhu Mythos and also appealed to viewers of The X-Files.

From comments I’ve received and from the reviews of the books, I believe I’ve succeeded.

What’s more, since his introduction, Pierce Mostyn has been my top selling series. Therefore, it’s only natural to revisit the paranormal as I contemplate starting a new series.

However, I wanted something a bit different from the Cosmic Horror, Cthulhu Mythos, focus of Mostyn. And since my first love as a reader is detective fiction (ever since discovering Nero Wolfe in the early 80s), what would be more natural than to blend detective fiction with the paranormal?

Thank goodness I don’t have to reinvent the wheel. The occult detective has a long and time-honored lineage and is alive and well today.

Therefore, my new series, which will most likely debut next year, will be a brother and sister team of occult detectives, or, in contemporary parlance, paranormal investigators.

Taking a page from the exploits of Flaxman Low, Thomas Carnacki, and Jules de Grandin, my investigators will explore those things that go bump in the night and scare the bejeebers out of people.

Haunted houses, demons, assorted monsters, arcane and occult magic. Twisted tales about two normal (well, mostly normal) young adults battling the ageless fears that underlie the veneer of our contemporary scientific sophistication.

As all good occult detectives have done, my hero and heroine will allay our fears of the unknown. Of course, such fears can never truly be put to rest. Can they?

Comments are always welcome! And until next time, happy reading!

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Pierce Mostyn – Paranormal Investigator

Pierce Mostyn fighting inter-dimensional beings. Photo from a secret OUP file.

The other week I ran across a magazine called The Occult Detective Quarterly. Since the occult detective is a relatively new interest of mine, I loaded a couple issues onto my iPad for a read.

I’m about halfway through the first issue and I can honestly give the zine a big thumbs up! I hope they get the money they need to publish issues 5 and 6.

The occult detective has a long and venerable history. I outlined a bit of that history in a previous post. I also noted that it was Seabury Quinn’s occult detective, Jules de Grandin, that saved Weird Tales magazine from going under very early in its history.

Today I’d like to focus attention on my own occult, or paranormal, investigator creation: Pierce Mostyn and the Office of Unidentified Phenomena.

I’m a fan of the Cthulhu Mythos, vampires, werewolves, re-animated corpses (whether they be creations of Dr Frankenstein, Herbert West, mummies, or old-fashioned zombies and zuvembies), and, of course, ghosts. Pretty much anything supernatural gets my vote, and even a few things that aren’t exactly supernatural but can be classed as weird.

Pierce Mostyn, paranormal investigator extraordinaire, and the Office of Unidentified Phenomena, led by uber-mysterious Dr Rafe Bardon, are America’s ultra-secret fighters whose mission is to stop and destroy those things it is best for us not to know they exist.

In Nightmare in Agate Bay, Mostyn and his team meet an off-shoot of the Esoteric Order of Dagon in backwater Agate Bay, Minnesota. Which Order was the same mysterious cult that plagued poor Innsmouth. We meet fish people and a shoggoth. Some of our favorite paranormals.

Mostyn’s next adventure, Stairway to Hell, takes him and his team to the subterranean world of K’n-yan. Where we find a super-race of fickle and sadistic beings, who just so happen to be worshippers of Cthulhu and his buddies.

In K’n-yan, while trying to find a way to escape, Mostyn encounters the beautiful and seductive H’tha-dub, who gives him a Faustian choice that could save his team and at the same time destroy his budding romance with team member Dotty Kemper. Duty or love, that is Mostyn’s choice. The choice should be easy. But is it?

We all know that while Cthulhu is a pretty gargantuan bad guy, he isn’t the only monster on the block. In Terror in the Shadows, Mostyn and his team encounter a family that has degenerated beyond the classification of human. A family that has undergone reverse evolution. The classic term for such a being is abhuman. And Mostyn encounters lots of them in the hills of Appalachia. For their part, the abhumans recognize a good protein source when they see one.

And if the monsters of natural degeneration aren’t enough, there’s Van Dyne’s Vampires — the product of modern science and the laboratory. Mostyn and team must face hordes of these lab-cultured demons who’d just as soon chomp your liver as suck your blood.

Evil never rests. After all, if it did, what would we paranormal writers write about? Which brings me to the upcoming Pierce Mostyn paranormal investigation: The Medusa Ritual. As an experiment, I intend to serialize the working draft of this short novel here on the website prior to its publication in book form this summer. But more on the serialized novel and The Medusa Ritual in the next couple weeks.

The first Pierce Mostyn investigation went public a year ago. And in the 12 months since I’ve had great fun getting to know the central gang: Mostyn himself, Dr Dotty Kemper, Willie Lee Baker, DC Jones, Helene Dubreuil, Dr Rafe Bardon, and the newest addition, Kymbra NicAskill.

I encourage you to take a look at my interpretation of the occult detective. You’ll find everything you love about the paranormal and good stories in the Pierce Mostyn Paranormal Investigations. There be monsters here!

Comments are always welcome! And until next time, happy reading!

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The Paranormal Investigator

Last week we took a look at the paranormal phenomenon in literature. The week I want to focus on the occult detective. Or in today’s parlance, the Paranormal Detective.

Edgar Allan Poe created the detective genre with his amateur sleuth, C. Auguste Dupin. It can easily be said that mother and son writing team, E. and H. Heron created the occult detective sub-genre with their Flaxman Low stories.

After Low’s introduction, a steady steam of occult detectives appeared on the literary scene. Some of them are:

Dr John Silence, created by Algernon Blackwood

Thomas Carnacki, created by William Hope Hodgson

Aylmer Vance, created by Alice and Claude Askew

Moris Klaw, created by Sax Rohmer

Jules de Grandin, created by Seabury Quinn

Steve Harrison, created by Robert E Howard

John Thunstone, created by Manly Wade Wellman

Dr Alex Caspian, created by Joseph Payne Brennan

Dirk Gently, created by Douglas Adams

Repairman Jack, created by F. Paul Wilson

The occult detective has also appeared on TV in shows such as Kolchak: The Night Stalker, Penny Dreadful, Twin Peaks, Angel, and, of course, The X-Files.

Twin Peaks and The X-Files gave a little twist to the occult detective genre by having the investigators FBI agents. The government was now involved, one way or the other, in the investigation of supernatural occurrences.

I grew up in the 50s and 60s. The UFO scare and the talk of government cover-ups was news. I remember reading of sightings, or watching reports on TV, along with the usual government “explanation”. I read books on UFOs “proving” their existence. Circumstantial evidence to be sure. But if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck…

Consequently, since writers write mostly about what they know, it was only a matter of time before my Muse gave me Pierce Mostyn and the Federal Office of Unidentified Phenomena. A Federal uber-secret agency whose purpose is to investigate and determine the threat level of those things that go bump in the night, and eliminate them if need be.

And what greater terror can there be, the greatest of those things that go bump in the night, then the Great Cthulhu and his ilk?

Lovecraft, in The Shadow Over Innsmouth, intimated that the Federal government was indeed interested in and sought to cover-up the existence of The Great Old Ones.

Pierce Mostyn and the Office of Unidentified Phenomena are a natural riff on Lovecraft and the government investigations and cover-ups alluded to in Lovecraft’s stories, Twin Peaks, and The X-Files. Along with being more action-oriented than those three predecessors.

Today, if you search Amazon, you’ll quickly see that the current crop of writers use the terms paranormal detective, or paranormal investigator.

The occult and supernatural are out, and the paranormal is in — at least as far as being a category identifier is concerned. So if you’re a writer writing about the occult and supernatural, just call it the paranormal and you should be alright.

Before I go, I do want to shine a spotlight on two excellent paranormal investigator reads. They are Herkimer’s Nose and Tony Price: Confidential (which is all three Tony Price volumes in one book). Richard Schwindt is an amazing storyteller. You won’t regret spending the 3 bucks to get these books.

Comments are always welcome! And until next time, happy reading!

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