For years, there’s been rumors of a recording of the televised suicide of Congressman Benjamin Hardy III in 1987. Word of the “Duncan Tape”, named after the late cameraman who tried to sell the video, pops up on urban legend chat rooms and with VHS traders all the time. The story goes, if you watch the recording, you too will be driven to suicide.
But no one has ever seen the tape, presumably because it doesn’t exist.
Robby and his friends get together on a Friday evening. As boredom sets in, they decide to download porn, urban legends the furthest things on their minds. But they watch a short clip which is more disturbing and more graphic than anything they could have dreamed of, and they soon learn that sometimes there’s a shred of truth to those crazy urban legends.
Why we’re excited about this book:
Over the last few years, Todd Keisling has taken the horror community by storm. Author of The Final Reconciliation, The Smile Factory, The Monochrome Trilogy, and Devil’s Creek, Todd’s short fiction is collected in Ugly Little Things, and he has stories featured in Midnight in the Pentagram, Arterial Bloom, One of Us: A Tribute to Frank Michaels Errington, and Weird Whispers among others. Covering a controversial subject isn’t easy, but Keisling’s deft hand presents readers with a raw and emotional experience with the disturbing and visceral horror his readers have come to expect. Sadie Hartman (from her review in Scream) says: “Keisling manages to evoke so much dread and horror into an impossibly slim book. I honestly don’t know how he did it. Scanlines can be read in a single sitting but the goosebumps and the explicit descriptions will linger long after you’ve finished.” and Michael Patrick Hicks (The Resurrectionists, Borne of the Deep) says: “Keisling writes one hell of a coming-of-age story here, and I suspect that much like the Duncan Tape, Scanlines is going to haunt me for a good long while.”
Forthcoming from Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing 11 May 2021, with a foreword by Max Booth III and an afterword by Keisling, Scanlines by Todd Keisling is available for pre-order now.
BOB PASTORELLA