TIH 606: Nat Cassidy on Early Life Lessons, Creative Journey, and Writing Routine

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TIH 606 Nat Cassidy on Early Life Lessons, Creative Journey, and Writing Routine

In this podcast, Nat Cassidy talks about his early life lessons, creative journey, and beginnings as a writer.

About Nat Cassidy

Nat Cassidy writes horror for the page, stage, and screen. His books include Mary: An Awakening of Terror, Nestlings, and Rest Stop. His award-winning horror plays have been produced throughout New York City and across the United States. He won the NY Innovative Theatre Award for his one-man show about H. P. Lovecraft, another for his play about Caligula, and was commissioned by the Kennedy Center to write the libretto for a short opera. He lives in New York City with his wife.

Show notes

Click the timestamps to jump straight to the audio.

[3:10] Early life lessons growing up.
[7:27] The first time Nat Cassidy set a classroom on fire.
[21:40] Writing for the Stephen King The Stand anthology, edited by Brian Keene and Christopher Golden.
[37:10] First creative career steps.
[54:21] Writing routine and daily habits.

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Mayhem Sam by J.D. Graves

Mayhem Sam is a rip-roaring tall-tale of revenge that drags a coffin of stolen confederate gold across the hellscape of Reconstruction Texas, the red dirt plains of Oklahoma, and explodes at the top of a Colorado mountain. Mayhem Sam is the true story of Texas’s tallest tale and its deepest, darkest legend.

The Girl in the Video by Michael David Wilson, narrated by RJ Bayley

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Michael David Wilson 0:07
Welcome to This Is Horror, a podcast for readers, writers and creators. I'm Michael David Wilson, and every episode, alongside my co host, Bob Pastorella, we chat with the world's best writers about writing, life, lessons, creativity and much more. Today on This Is Horror. We are talking to Nat Cassidy. Nat Cassidy is an acclaimed writer of novels, including Mary an awakening of terror, nestlings and rest stop. His forthcoming book when the wolf comes home, will be out in April. Now, the conversation with NAT is an interesting one, and one in which we exclusively, in this episode, talk about his early life and writing lessons. So we don't get into the details of his fantastic books, because those episodes will be coming up a little bit later. But what we did have was a fascinating conversation in which we really got to learn a lot about nats life and his creative work as an actor, novelist and playwright. So before we get in to this incredible conversation, a quick advert break

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Michael David Wilson 3:03
without said, Here it is. It is Nat Cassidy on This Is Horror. Nat, welcome to This Is Horror. Hello.

Nat Cassidy 3:16
This Is Horror. It's good to be here at long last. Big fan of the show, glad to be here.

Michael David Wilson 3:22
Yeah, it's great to have you here. And as you may have anticipated, we often like to start all the way at the beginning of one's life. So I want to know what some of the early life lessons were that you learned growing up,

Nat Cassidy 3:42
let's see. I learned how to stand and walk. Eventually, I learned bowel and bladder control. These have all been very key in a professional setting. I'm very glad to have these skills flash forward a little bit further, and I don't know I can give you the whole, I can give you the the Reader's Digest arc, I suppose I So, I grew up in in Phoenix, Arizona. I grew up in the desert. I grew up in a very isolated part of Phoenix at the time too. This would have been in the the early 80s when we moved there. I was like two when we moved to Arizona. And, yeah, it was so it was very isolated kind of existence. It was a latch key kid with a single mom who could only work part time because she also had MS, so she was she could only, you know, physically stand to work part time hours. But it was also a job that kind of worked her overtime. So it was a very, very strange schedule. She had to work all of which is to say I was alone a lot of the time, isolated a lot of the time, because we lived far away from anyone else that I knew, and it's the desert, so you don't really like go out and play a lot of the time, and yeah, so I very quickly became in. Enamored of the library and the used bookstore that were near our house, those were like the two oases next to me, and from an early age, was just kind of a an obsessive reader and writer of primarily horror. The other side of this story is that I was also a precocious little child actor who was obsessed with Shakespeare, so I was doing, I was doing a lot of Shakespeare, reading a lot of Shakespeare, performing in Shakespeare, and like community theater and regional theater of a type, and then writing really shitty mainly like Stephen King knock off short stories set in Maine, a place I've still never been and knew nothing of growing up in the desert. And yeah, so like that was just kind of my life until, you know, high school, and then I went to college in Tucson, Arizona, a little further south, and got my degree in classical acting, and moved to New York to pursue classical acting. And then about two months later, I realized I didn't like classical acting anymore, and kind of realized I'd been reading scripts my whole life, and I've been writing horror stories my whole life, but never once did I thought to write a horror script. So I kind of turned my focus to writing plays, original horror plays that I wrote off and Off, off Broadway, and did that for like, 15 years, and then kind of got bored with that. You'll notice a theme where I do something for for a while, and then I get bored with it, and I also realized you can't make a living as a playwright in this country. So I decided to jump into the ultra lucrative, ultra powerful medium of book writing, kind of realized like I missed that original, you know, expansive sort of freedom that I'd had when I first started writing original horror stories. And kind of re fell in love with writing books again and short stories again. And I still act, you know, I still do a lot of TV and stuff like that. And occasionally I'll do some some classical theater too, when the when the whim strikes me, but for the most part, like I'm I'm all in on writing books and short stories, and it very much has felt like coming home. And so that's what I've been spending most of my time doing. That was a very expansive summary of my professional journey thus far. How'd I do?

Michael David Wilson 7:27
Oh yeah. There were a lot of details, but there was one detail that didn't come up, and that was your propensity to setting classrooms on fire. Ooh, you've done your research. Oh yeah, oh yeah. So I want to know when did you first set a classroom on fire, and did you like horror before or after? Was it perhaps in that moment when the flames went up, you were like, horror is the life for me, like this?

Nat Cassidy 7:58
No, it was, as far as I can tell, as far as I'm aware, I was always drawn to and somewhat repelled by really macab stuff. Like I was a kid who was just deeply, deeply interested in horrific, scary things. And I was also a very sensitive, anxious kid, so I would pay the price, especially when I was like, Home Alone. The horror that I was really into really got to me. It really fucked me up. And then I would be like, oh, I want more of that feeling. I think, you know, they kind of probably fed each other in a sort of double helix sort of way, because the more compelled I became, the more afraid I was. And then the more afraid it was, the more compelled I became to try and, like, you know, master it or understand these things that I was being drawn to. So it was just like on and on and on, this kind of perpetual motion. My first classroom fire was probably first grade, the first of many. And actually it, it, they go hand in hand, the horror love and the the the kind of disruptive student love, because I sure loved it at the time. But I was very bored. I was very frustrated. I was a I was a smart kid, and my older brother was also a very smart kid, so he got skipped ahead of grade when he was very, very young, and kind of paid the price for that socially, like it kind of messed him up a little bit to have skipped a grade and then been like the youngest person in his cohort. So my mom didn't want to do that with me. She kept me in the grade that I was supposed to be in. And I'm also born in September, which is, you know, probably more details than you need, but like that already made me like the oldest person in my classroom, naturally. So I was just kind of like doubly frustrated by the. The class that I was in, so just get really bored, and I would act out, and I would throw curse words at the teacher, and I would bring knives to school. I would carve things in the desk. I would sometimes just like light matches and throw them at people adults. I didn't do it to other kids. I was not a monster, but I was clearly just like, very frustrated, very bored. It was not getting something that I needed. And it got to the point in first grade where I was not allowed to have my own desk. I had to sit at the teacher's desk just to have a flat surface, but I couldn't have anything to like, store my own personal material in, because it would have been too illicit and destructive. And that same first grade teacher even instituted a new, I don't know, program where I had to bring home a red or a green piece of construction paper to my mom every day to show if I had a good or a bad day, that she then had to sign and I would bring back until I figured out how to forge her signature, but all of which is to say like so that was the sort of little fucking monster that I was at that age. But that same first grade teacher was showing a slide presentation to class one day, and she was Greek, she was from Greece, and she had just gone back to Greece for some sort of vacation, and she's showing us slides of all the sites that she saw. And then one of them was a was an original Greek amphitheater where she saw production of Macbeth. And I don't know why this woman started telling the the plot of Macbeth to a bunch of six year olds. But to her credit, she noticed that I kind of like started paying attention when she was talking about witches and murder and regicide and and things like that. So she dared me to read Macbeth. She was like, You think you're so fucking smart, not in so many words, but basically it was the chest. So try and read this. Play, like, you think it's interesting. Read it. Tell me about it. You know, let's see if you can do it. And I was not one to shrink from a challenge, especially from my nemesis. So it was like my year long sort of project with my mom reading Macbeth, and that's, that's how I fell in love with Shakespeare, like, that's what set me on my path to pursuing Shakespeare, but it was all rooted in the fact that it was about witches. It was about death, it was about murder, it was about these things that even at that age, I was just deeply, deeply into. And if anything, I think my love of horror wound up giving that anger and that restlessness and those kind of destructive tendencies a sort of safe port to flow into, rather than like being responsible for me being a little shit. I think it helped me grow out of that little shit phase, because I got to put all that stuff in the stories that I was writing at that age. I got to I got to explore destructive tendencies in a in a confined, far less flammable way. And

Michael David Wilson 13:06
I mean in terms of this teacher, as you said to begin with, you were kind of rivals, and she was your nemesis, but by the end, and at the point where she then introduced you to Macbeth, and you'd responded really well to it. I mean, did did you then have a kind of different relationship? There

Nat Cassidy 13:30
wasn't that much personal growth. Yeah, I was still, like, six or seven, so no, I always, I always hated her, but I do, I'm sure she's, you know, 100 years dead. By this point, she was already very old. But sometimes I wish I could have, at least at one point, like communicated to her what a incredibly impactful person she was on my life, because she's really responsible for a lot of, like, my biggest passions. So in retrospect, hats off to you, Mrs. Schmidt, you've done good to be 1,000% honest. And I've talked about her before in other interviews. I have now reached the age where I'm like, Was her name Mrs. Schmidt or Mrs. Shapiro? Because I had a teacher of both names at some point in my life, so I'm not entirely sure if she was Mrs. Schmidt or Mrs. Shapiro, but that's, I know there was a show, so thank you, Mrs. Schmidt or Mrs. Shapiro, wherever you may be.

Michael David Wilson 14:29
I mean, what's the other teacher? Good too, because then they can get at your shout out. Or was the the other one completely useless and

Nat Cassidy 14:40
useless until, like, I think it was until, like, third grade. I always had an adversarial relationship with teachers anyway. And then my third grade teacher was a little nicer and a little more understanding. And then, like, fourth and fifth grade, it was back to adversarial. And by the time I was, like, in sixth grade, that's when I mellowed out. A bit more until, like middle school, when I was, you know, everyone is miserable those years. And I was, I was insufferable yet again. But yeah, I did have a tenuous relationship with most teachers, for for my for my primary education,

Michael David Wilson 15:18
and I mean, alongside Macbeth at six years old. Were you also reading Stephen King at that age too? I mean, what were the stories? And also in terms of your mother, was she encouraging of this? Was she aware of what was

Nat Cassidy 15:37
going on? She was my mom was a huge Stephen King fan and a huge, like, Gen popular genre fan in general. So this was, I was born in 81 so we're talking like, this is like 8788 by this point. So it's like the height of, like, mass market, Stephen King, Dean, Coons, Clive Barker. And then, you know, the other, the other kind of literary trademarks of that era, like, you know, Michael Crichton and and Anna rice. And just like any of those classic mass market like grocery store best sellers, she loved a very clear, fond memories of her reading the hard cover of Jurassic Park that had just come out, and I was bugging her for something, and she was so into the book that she got so mad at me for constantly interrupting her. So she was a big reader. She loved it. And, you know, she I've talked about this before too, that she was dealt a very, very rough hand, very unfair hand, you know, again, single, single working mom with a progressive disease like it was, she was dealing with a lot of shit, and I think she used reading and movies and things like that as kind of her form of of Dealing with these very heavy things, and helping her sons deal with these very heavy things. Like, like, knowing that her her body would start to fail, and like, we had significantly less money than any of our peers and stuff like that. Like, she really found a way to to cultivate a love of of not just storytelling, but heightened storytelling, different worlds, different different horrible situations that the characters are going through, that maybe we can, you know, thank our lucky stars we're not experiencing and stuff like that. She was never shy about the nature of the things that she was reading. She did kind of say, I'm pretty I'm pretty overbooked as it is. So if you read something that freaks you out, you're kind of on your own. You have to sort of self regulate the sort of things that you read. So she never, like told me, I can't read her Stephen King books, and they were situated on a shelf in our living room right above, like a record player. Like they had a very holy real estate, and I could see them all the time. So she was never like, no. She was just like, do it when you're ready. Because otherwise it's, it's, it's, it's your sleepless night, like, I can't help you. And I was, I was hip to that. I was like, okay, great, I appreciate that. So I didn't start reading Stephen King until maybe, maybe, like, I think it was eight. I think the first Stephen King, right? I was eight. Up until that point, I was reading like, you know, the sort of like child friendly, scary stories and things like that. I forget if goosebumps was out yet I became a Goosebumps reader, just kind of as a, you know, it was there, and I loved it, but I did read things like, I don't know if this will mean anything to either of you, but, like, binocular was a big favorite of mine, which was about a vampire rabbit, delightful little child. Remember that? Yeah, it was great. And I had like, two or three sequels that I was a big fan of so so from like six to eight, it was anything that was just kind of coded as horror. And then I was like, All right, I'm ready. Let's do this. I like, walked in on the mini series of it when it was airing that my mom was watching, and it really fucked me up. It was the fortune cookie scene, and my brother had just checked the movie tie in edition of it out from the library, and so I started reading that, but it was too big for me to read in time. So I decided to pick up the smaller, far more child friendly book of Pet Cemetery. And that was my first. That was my first, Stephen King, and I, at the time, also had, like a best best friend who was kind of like my, you know, like, stand by me. Sort. Friend. You know, the only kind of friend that you can have is, like a pre teen, those, like, really intense, formative relationships, and he was also really into horror and Stephen King. And we kind of had a sort of ad hoc book club where we would both read Stephen King books and Clive Barker books and Dean Koontz books and Anne Rice books, and just kind of all of all of those books, and we would talk about them, and we would compare notes, and we would egg each other on to write more things. And so from age eight on, it was all Stephen King, all the time. I read a ton. I read all the other, you know, the the peer group of that era. But I I found my obsession with Stephen King, and became very much a Stephen King completist. And yeah, was was committed from then on out to read everything he'd ever published, and then some Yeah,

Michael David Wilson 20:50
and I wasn't planning on going into this area now, but then, I guess with This Is Horror, we kind of take things in whatever direction the conversation demands, but to talk about your love and your obsession with Stephen King books, and then to know, I believe later this year, if I've got the publication date correct, you've got a story in the stand anthology, which I believe is edited by Brian Keene and Christopher golden. So, I mean, how did that come about? And what is that like to now have a story in an anthology that wouldn't exist if it wasn't for you know, your favorite writer, essentially, yeah,

Nat Cassidy 21:41
it's I, it's a career honor. I am so over the moon to have a story in that anthology. And I pestered Brian and Chris a lot to to let me have a crack at writing something, and to their immense credit, they did, and they accepted the thing that I wrote, which takes the assignment and runs with it in a strange direction. I'll say it is very I've had plenty of people read that story who know nothing about Stephen King, and they assured me that it it works as a story, but for people who are Stephen King obsessives, it is just like, it's a fucking minefield of easter eggs. It's so many references and and things like that, to the point where, when I turned it in, Brian and Chris were like, you know, we didn't get permission to use all this, right? Like, we only got permission to use, like, Mother Abigail and Randall flag, and you're pulling in all this other stuff. So we got to get Steve to sign off on this, and they had to specifically take my story and make sure he was okay with it. And he was, thank God, and has said some very nice things about it specifically. So yeah, it's just, it's a thrill this, and especially because it is the stand to like the stand was my mom's number one favorite book, not just her favorite Stephen King book, but I think her her most favorite book of all time. Like it was that book was a huge deal to her. I was an IT kid, you know, it kind of seemed like you were in one of two camps when it came to Stephen King fandom. You were the stand heads and you were the it heads. I was a, I was an eight head. But I love the stand. The stand is, is one of my favorites. And the, you know, the mini series from 94 was a big event in our in our household, and I've seen that, God knows how many times the soundtrack is like one of my writing soundtracks and stuff like that. So the stand is just like a property that I am deeply invested in and means a lot to me. So it like triple fold, quadruple fold, to be in that anthology and to be like the the second to last story, no less, there's just something about that placement too that's that makes me very happy. You got to read a lot of pages to get to my story. That thing is big. That thing is over 800 pages.

Michael David Wilson 24:16
I mean, apropos given, yeah, right, the stand is. It's

Bob Pastorella 24:22
slim comparatively. Yeah. Speaking of Slim, which version of the standee like? Do you like the lean and mean original, or do you like the uncircumcised? Well,

Nat Cassidy 24:32
let me just say, let me just the difference between the two is important to my story. That's how that's the level of nerdery we get. It's actually Okay, okay. The fact that there are two editions is important. You know, I love, who doesn't love a good foreskin, the unexpurgated one. There's stuff in it that I would miss going forward. I love the original. I think there are, there are perks to the to the edited one there. There is a concision to it. Relatively speaking, I mean, it's still, like, it's still 795, it's

Bob Pastorella 25:10
a door stopper. Yeah, shortened

Nat Cassidy 25:13
door stopper. There's some stuff about it that works really, really well. And there's some stuff about the the unexpurgated one that, you know, it's a little patty, um, but I don't I. I'm the sort of guy who's like, you know, my favorite Beatles album is The White Album, because it has more Beatles in it. So, like, right? More, more Stephen King is not a bad thing to me. So even though I can see why someone would like the slimmer version of the stand. I would miss things like the kid and things like Franny's mom and all that. Like, it's just there's so much stuff in the in the complete stand that I got to go with the full one.

Bob Pastorella 25:51
Yeah, I kind of liken it to even though it's not a doorstopper. It's like reading the pale brown thing versus, you know, Our Lady of darkness. It's like they're both, they're both good, yeah, but our lady of darkness is so much better. You know, it's all, it's all in the details, yeah,

Nat Cassidy 26:09
yeah. Who doesn't want to have more of the things they love the world soon? We might as well enjoy a longer book. You know, yes,

Bob Pastorella 26:16
and big books are coming back. So I'm glad that this anthology is going to be an eight, 900 page affair.

Nat Cassidy 26:23
That's, that's great. Yeah, I cannot wait to hold the hard cover in my hand because it's, it's, it's gonna feel fucking nostalgic to just have this fucking chunk of pages.

Michael David Wilson 26:38
Oh yeah, when you said that you pestered Brian and Chris to get into the anthology. What are we talking here? Did they originally invite you? Did you start sending a lot of emails? What? What is the level of pestering that went on here? I

Nat Cassidy 26:56
don't know how much I'm allowed to say. Actually, it was, it was before all invitations had gone out, I believe so it was like when it was first kind of rumored to be happening. And so I kind of, this is, I think, bad form. I kind of did a thing that was bad form, but the project was just too important to me to to, to not do it, so I was proactive about it. And I was just like, you know, I know you're starting to invite people to this anthology. I don't know if you were planning on inviting me or not, but I have a great idea that I would love to write. And to their credit, they weren't like, Well, no, now we're double plus uninviting you. They were like, Okay, tell us the idea. And I mean, they're both incredible dudes. They're phenomenal writers too, but they're also just really, really kind and considerate guys. And I think they could also tell just how much the project meant to me anyway. So they were, they were willing to hear me out, whether, whether they were planning to or not they were willing to hear me out.

Michael David Wilson 28:02
Well, either way, it was obviously so good that they not only had to contact steve King to get his permission to sign it off, but then, as you say, they placed it as the penultimate story. So penultimate

Nat Cassidy 28:17
story, yeah, but I don't

Michael David Wilson 28:22
know. I mean, in some ways, you know, you say what you did could be considered bad form, and there's always these rules, do do this, don't do this. But I think, and I'm not saying this is advice to everyone you can take, but we are always our biggest advocate, right? So if we don't stand up for ourselves, if we don't try and make things happen, exactly who else will do it? And the way that I kind of operate, again, not saying that I should, but I am saying that I do is that, you know, it's like, let's, let's do something now in terms of professionally, and then let's ask for forgiveness later if it happens to not be the right thing to do. And I feel too it's like, if you don't ask, you don't know, and if you get a no, you are in no worse a position than you were to begin with,

Nat Cassidy 29:19
right? And that, like the, you know, the general rule of thumb is to not do that sort of proactive asking, because it can get very aggressive. It can get very uncomfortable. But, you know, if you do it in a friendly way, and if you do it in a way that is not obtrusive and is just kind of like, you know, I just needed to say this, and you can ignore this email. There are worse things. There are worse ways to comport oneself. So, yeah, there's always the execution of a thing is, is also kind of paramount. Nobody, nobody should assume they're owed anything. But, you know, sometimes it doesn't hurt to ask you.

Michael David Wilson 30:00
Yeah, yeah. I think that is the key caveat, you know, the way that you go about it. And, yeah, don't be a dick. Yeah, don't be a dick. A good rule for life, for writing, for everything, yeah. And yeah, I like as well this idea, you know, that you said, and that I generally have, and that's nobody owes me shit. I don't take anything or anyone for granted, yeah, in any aspect of life. And I think that means that you tend to be happier, because then if you get something good, then you're more appreciative of it, right?

Nat Cassidy 30:38
Yeah? And also, don't like fires in the back of the classroom. I mean,

Michael David Wilson 30:42
probably not, but it has worked out well for your career. So I before this conversation, before researching your life, I would have said, yeah, obviously don't set a classroom on fire. But now

Nat Cassidy 31:00
I suppose the the the fine print is, don't do it when you can be tried as an adult, when you're a cute little kid, do it as much as you want, because then it's kind of fun and precocious, and it makes for a good anecdote. But then, you know, when you're when you're grown up, don't like fires. I've also said, this is dark as hell, but This Is Horror. I've often said that is, I'm so lucky that I was not born a few years later because Columbine happened when I was a junior in high school, and so I had one more year of public education to, like, briefly experience the sort of security level ramp up. But if I had been in that level of behavior, kind of post, those security additions, I would have been expelled, like, probably within a few months. I never would have made it through the public school system like post 1999 so I was lucky. That was a rather more laissez faire sort of atmosphere in the 80s. Yeah, he brought a bowie knife to school. Let's just take it away from him and give it to him after class, like that was the level of punishment we got, and then give the kid like a carton of cigarettes and send him on his way.

Michael David Wilson 32:26
Yeah, yeah, I hear you there. And, I mean, I'm so glad that, you know, I'm not a teenager or Uni student now, because I did some dumb shit. And I think as well, you know, even without thinking about the way that you might be kicked out or potentially locked up this generation, which makes me sound so old, this fucking generation, but that there's, there's cameras everywhere, anything you do is now potentially Going to go on the internet and go viral, and we did a lot of dumb shit, a lot of dumb shit that I'm glad there is no record of 100%

Nat Cassidy 33:09
the book that I'm writing right now that is currently behind this, this zencastr screen, this book that is kicking My ass right now, and is, is, like a month late, and it's, it's driving me crazy, but I got to turn it in as soon as possible. Is a so this will be the book that I, you know, assuming I don't shit the bed too badly on my delivery dates. Will be coming out next year. It is my sort of homage to kids on bikes. You know, it's stand by me, that sort of, that sort of sub genre, but it's set now because I specifically wanted to see if you could even tell that kind of story about this generation of kids, you know, dealing with cell phones, dealing with everything being recorded, dealing with everything being on the internet. And it's so I've been, I've been doing a lot of research and interviews and stuff like that, and I feel the same way, like there's the level of balance that these poor kids have to find between public and private behavior is well nigh impossible. Like it is such a fine needle to thread. It's so challenging. There's so many fucking things they have to be aware of. It's a lot. It's a lot. And back in our day, it wasn't like that, like we just got to go outside until the street lights came on, and then we'd go home and and talk about the fires we set that day. That's

Michael David Wilson 34:45
right, that's exactly what we did every day.

Bob Pastorella 34:51
That's what we did every day. I mean, growing up in Texas, you know, it's like, you know, hey, boy, it was like, Why did you miss school yesterday? Because I got. Shot an eye with a pellet gun, right? He did that my daddy. He was cleaned up. Yeah, I'm okay, though, I'll be able to see in a week senior year get in a fight in the principal's office. So lucky didn't go to jail. God damn. Like, I mean, in the principal's office, knocked over a book stand and all that. And, mean, you know, just, hey guys, we don't have to solve this problem. We have people who will, you know, came, like, this close 717 about to be arrested. Yeah, told my dad I thought that was gonna make him think I was, you know, good. He was like, no, no, that's, that's not good at all. That's, that's about as dumb as you could fucking get.

Nat Cassidy 35:42
Yeah,

Bob Pastorella 35:44
no, yeah, yeah. It's, you know? I don't, I don't. I see the kids now, and I know that they, they've gone through things that we that we've never gone through, and they've learned in ways that we've never learned in school. Yeah, and they're so technology driven that I do worry about them, but also I see a lot of promise I really do. Oh, yeah, it's like these, these, you know, they're fucking smart,

Nat Cassidy 36:15
they're so smart, and they're so passionate, and they care about the world in a really beautiful way.

Bob Pastorella 36:23
And I love it when I get, when I and I work with the public I get, I get a customer, young daughter in there, and she's telling me about the book she's reading. And I'm like, Just, please keep reading. Don't ever stop don't ever stop reading. Because it's like, did you ever read this one? And I'm like, Well, I don't know. Tell me about it, you know, and so, and I love that. It's just we got to see that more of that. Yeah,

Nat Cassidy 36:46
yeah. I have, I have a lot of faith. I have a lot of faith in the kids these days. And you're right, they have dealt with an unbelievable amount. Yeah, I can't, I cannot imagine what it must have been like to, like, go through lockdown and quarantine during, like, the most important social years of your life. Like, yeah,

Michael David Wilson 37:11
well, I want to talk more about your kind of writing career and creative trajectory, and because there's a lot of kind of pieces of the puzzle of NAT Cassidy, and obviously, you're a playwright, you're a writer, you've done a lot of acting as well, also known as you're an actor. I don't know why that one at that point. So I mean, what? What were the first steps professionally, and then what is the balance now in terms of the jobs and the work that you're doing? Hmm,

Nat Cassidy 37:51
yeah, how would I describe the first steps professionally? That's an interesting question. I've never really thought of it in that, in that kind of way, because on one hand, it was a long, long, long, long, long journey to get to a sort of professional level in in inverted commas. And when I look back on it, it kind of seems like it was all up a piece. It was, sometimes I forget that it can be weird to like, know the things you want to do at a very young age. I have a feeling most of us in our in our community, were probably pretty similar. I think most people who are like writers and things like that know they want to be a writer for a long time, not that you have to. It's great if you're if you're late to it, or you come to it later in life. But just anecdotally, I feel like most of the writers I know have been like, this was something I knew I wanted to do ever since I knew I wanted to do something, and I forget that that's kind of, that's kind of weird, like there are a lot of people who kind of don't know what they want to do for a long time. So I was so to put that in in context, I was sending short stories off from a from a young age to publications and things like that, and collecting rejections. And I was auditioning and and doing professional theater from a from a young age. So in that respect, like, it's just kind of, it's just been a long continuum of, you know, whatever job is in front of me is the next job. That's the kind of, one of the things about the the acting career is that it's, you know, obviously very journeyman, like, and it's very sporadic and it's very hard to predict. But on the other hand, there are like professional benchmarks, like, you know, I joined all the all the actor unions, like 20 years ago, or something like that. So in some ways, my my professional life began when I moved to New York and I started doing New York. Theater, and then film and TV, and then also, in a lot of ways, my my writing career sort of began when I started playwriting in my in my 20s, because none of the stuff I did up until that point reached a certain level of prominence or reach. But then when I started doing playwriting like then I was actually, like, building a name for myself as an author, and, you know, getting off Broadway workshops and having regional productions around the country and stuff like that, and getting things published. Or you could look at my first my profession began in 2017 when I when my first book was published, which was a novelization of an audio drama that I was helping produce and that I was acting in at the time. So there were a lot of there were a lot of periods in my career where I was incredibly frustrated and I was incredibly angry. I get that little angry kid has never left it just kind of finds other things to light fires about. So I was just like, so frustrated with my career, of like, well, you know, when auditions would would dry up, or I wasn't being seen for, you know, this movie or that show or that that theatrical production, or something like that, I would just get so mad inside of like, why isn't this happening? Why isn't this happening? And would then have to find something else to do to kind of deal with those frustrations, which is how I started playwriting in the first place. And then playwriting started to build up all these frustrations, you know, why aren't I getting these? Why aren't I getting that workshop, or why aren't I being seen by that theater, or so on so on. Why? Why didn't I win that one grant that, you know, 1000 playwrights are applying for at the same time, because there's only like five professional opportunities as a playwright in this country. For some god damn reason, you know. So it was things like that. So that's what led me to then start working in audio drama with some other similarly frustrated theater friends, playwriting friends. And the reason why I say all this in a very rambling, incoherent fashion is just that at the time, it seemed like it was a number of dead ends that I kept reaching and a number of things that it was like, Oh my God. I thought this thing was gonna work out, and it hasn't fucking worked out. And then you have to make like, that right turn, that right angle, turn to like something different, something lateral, but different. And then looking back on it, you realize that it was actually much more of a, you know, kind of an unbroken stream that was just kind of taking you in different directions. So, like, I wouldn't be a a novelist right now. I wouldn't have the books that I've written, you know, exist, had I not, you know, formed that audio drama company with with those friends, and done a show that tour books, CO produced, and allowed me to write that novelization that gave me my first book deal. And that wouldn't happen if I wasn't a playwright first and built my my name as a playwright, and built certain skills as a playwright. And that wouldn't have happened if I wasn't an actor who wasn't getting cast in a lot of things. So I the reason why I, kind of, you know, think that there's value in recounting that that story is that there's, there's just so many times where it can feel like either your professional journey hasn't started or it's dead in the water, but you're it's actually setting you up for another thing that will get you to that place where ultimately you wanted to go in the first place. Because, you know, it's just one more additional tangent. I book a lot more work as an actor now, because I do not really care about auditioning for things. You know, like, I get auditions for things, in it is a pain in my ass, because I have writing deadlines, and it's like, I have to fucking set time aside, and I gotta learn these lines, and I gotta film this thing, and I just don't want to do it. And that would have been a thing that I would have, like, killed for 10 years ago, and now it's this thing of this, like, Okay, I'll do it, and that leads you to be a lot more free in the acting and free in the performance, and it doesn't mean as much, which is ultimately like one of the things you're always striving for as an actor, to just kind of let the thing be so that's just like another example of how all these different tangential things actually contribute to your ultimate goals In the first place. If that made any sense,

Michael David Wilson 44:42
it did, yeah. And it spiraled off so many questions and areas that I want to tackle that, you know, the difficult part is like, which one do we go? Yeah, I speak in very

Nat Cassidy 44:55
compound sentences. I apologize. It's very hard. Diagram.

Michael David Wilson 45:01
But you know, it's better than if we give like a broad question and then someone comes back with a sentence answer. It's like, yes, shit. I'm not sure what to do with this. So this is a good problem to have. But I mean, you know, you talk about past frustrations and things. So I wonder at this point in your career, what are you happiest with, and what is your biggest frustration and what is perhaps your biggest goal? Now the frustration and the goal may be late. I can be cheeky and say

Nat Cassidy 45:39
my biggest frustration is I still haven't gotten that. Steve, gotten that Stephen King blurb. One of these days I want that Stephen King blurb. That's my that's my big goal. I almost don't know what I'll do after that, like I might just like take the wind out of my sails, and I won't know what to do after that. But Steve, if you're listening, blurb one of my books. Please, please, Buddy, please. No, that's pathetic. No, I the thing that I am it was, you asked what I'm grateful for was that one of the questions

Michael David Wilson 46:13
it was, yeah, yeah,

Nat Cassidy 46:14
the thing I'm grateful for is literally just to to be here doing this like I there are some days when this will slightly repeat what I just kind of rambled about in my my prior answer. But there are some days when I look at how I wound up as a novelist, and it almost feels like I stumbled ass backwards into it, like I got a book deal, and then I was like, you know, I need an agent to look at this book contract. And just kind of like, Googled book agents and found my agent that way because I already had a contract in hand with it, with a big five publisher. But again, I didn't, I didn't get that book contract without a decade and a half of being a professional writer who was thirsty as hell for representation and couldn't get an agent to save my life as a playwright and had to do everything by myself. So you know, sometimes it feels like I stumbled ass backwards into into professional novel writing, but also there was a whole lot of runway leading up to it, and a whole lot of work. But that being said, like I still can't not see other people's journeys and how hard it can be to get that first book published, how hard it can be to get representation, how hard it can be to, you know, have your first book do well, or, you know, just like get get seen by the people you want it to get seen. And so I feel extremely stratospherically lucky that, you know, I wound up at Tor that allowed me to wind up at night fire. They have done so phenomenally well by me. You know, they've treated me so well, and the books that we've worked on together have done really well and have found their audience. And you know, just, it never gets old. Ever, ever strike me down, if it ever gets old to, like, hear from a reader who, who read something I wrote and it resonated with them, like, that's just like the most amazing fucking feeling. And maybe even more so, because, like, you know, I first kind of found my legs as a writer, as a playwright, where you hear from very few people, and it can feel very isolating, and you create a thing, and you pour all your heart and soul into it, and then it runs for a month, and then it might as well never have existed at all like no one can experience it. So to have these things that have like an actual shelf life, and people can just find them at their own pace and reach out to you and say, you know, this meant something to me, is just, it's fucking It's wild. It's like, so amazing. It's so wonderful that it's like, one of those profound things that sounds so simple when you when you say it, but it's like, it's the biggest thing like, to just read someone's book, and, you know, have it mean something to you, I will never get over that. So that's the thing I'm the most grateful for, is just to like be here, to have like books to talk with you both about, you know, it's amazing. And I'm really grateful for independent publishers like shortwave, who published my novella rest stop, and, you know, to have the flexibility even to publish something with a different house, you know, because night fire gave me their blessing to to do this and to experiment and to try new things and stuff like that. So every you. Maybe I'm saying this because the current book I'm writing is again kicking my ass, but every book feels like a fucking miracle, and so I feel very grateful to have pulled off a few miracles so far, and to be surrounded by people who are also just magnificent miracle workers. Present company included goals. I don't know goals. I really want to continue trying to do a book a year. I might have shot myself in the foot with that one for the coming year. We'll see if I can get something out for 2026 I think so, knock on wood. But, yeah, I just want to keep doing it really like I I want them to, you know, as long as publishers are still willing to publish my my stuff, and people are willing to keep reading them and buying them, and I can, you know, just have this be the thing that I do for a living. That's, that's the ultimate goal. Like I would just love to be able to focus on this. I got a lot more books I want to

Michael David Wilson 51:01
write. Oh, yeah, that is a good position to be in. And in terms of the players, and you spoke about, obviously, in a sense, they have a short shelf life, because, you know, you put it on, it's on for a finite amount of time, and then that's that. Now I wonder, are you hoping, or are you considering, perhaps writing the novelization or the short story of some of these plays so that you can, you know, repurpose, I suppose, these creative ideas.

Nat Cassidy 51:39
Yeah, it's a very good, smart question, and I have already done that a few times. So short wave, who published rest stop, they also published two chat books that are little short stories of mine. Both of those chat books originally were short plays, because I've got a bunch of short plays. So they started their life as little short plays and made like a very, you know, kind of natural translation into short story. I have another full length play, very full length play, an ultra full length play, a four act play that I wrote, like 15 years ago that was kind of my homage to Shakespearian history plays, but it's a haunted house story about an American president that was a play then was an opera that also was optioned for TV and had a bunch of very fancy people attached to it and pitched around for years and years, and might one day find its legs as a TV project again. But that's one that, even just a couple of months ago, I was like, Oh, maybe I should write that into a book. Like, I've got so much I've got, literally, a television Bible and multiple episodes of this thing written. Like, maybe I'll just turn that into a book and just have that exist. So, like, I've thought of that a lot. I've also been speaking with another indie publisher who's expressed interest in maybe publishing some of these play scripts too, because they're just kind of sitting around. And I, perhaps unsurprisingly to anyone who's read the stuff that I write. I wrote very reader friendly plays, let's say like my stage directions have a lot of detail in them, so they kind of make for an easy read. So they would be good being published on their own, even. So we'll see those might you know, that conversation might come to fruition, and those plays could be available at some point too. But yeah, there are. Is, I was a very prolific playwright, like I would try and write two to three full length plays a year, and then God knows how many short plays. So there's a lot of material, and I do want it to see the light of day in some form or another over the years. So yeah, it will probably happen a lot in the short story form, where I will, like, take a little, a little short play and flesh it out a little bit. So

Michael David Wilson 54:21
I want to know a little bit about your writing routine and your daily routine and how you structure that, but I anticipate that based on what you've said, it might be more helpful to almost look at a weekly routine, a monthly or perhaps even a yearly because there are so many moving pieces. I mean, you try to have one novel a year as a kind of stable thing, but then you've also recently and delightfully got into this rhythm with short wave where, I guess there could be one, there could be two, maybe in a really ambitious. Year, if Alan is up for it, there could be free novels. And then, on occasion, there's also these acting roles as well. I'm not even sure if you're actively screen writing or writing plays at this juncture. So what? What does a year look like? What does a day look like? How are you structuring it all

Nat Cassidy 55:22
not well, is the short answer. I, for some reason, the last year has made everything so much harder, to the point where there I'm even, like, maybe I've got like, a touch of the long COVID or something like that. Like, it has been so exponentially harder to focus and get work done this past year, for some reason. And there, there are, you know, exogenous factors beyond that of like we, my wife and I have been dealing with some very no fun health issues and things like that that have that have eaten up a lot of time and a lot of focus. So that being said, Generally, the sort of rhythm that I've been in for the past handful of years is I'll get up around like six and I'll write for like an hour or two, then I would have to leave to go to my day job, which is in the city in New York, and then I would do that, and I would steal whatever time I could to write at the office, which is very hard to do, and then I would get home, do home stuff, and then maybe have, like, another hour to write At night, so not a ton of writing time. And I would try and, like, make it count whenever I could. And I think as a prose writer, I'm, I'm not a Stephen Graham Jones, I'm not a clay Chapman, like they fire off like, probably two, three full manuscripts a year. I tend to need, like nine months to write, like a full length nine to 12 months to write a full length manuscript, first draft, so and then each second, each subsequent draft is like three months, or something like that. But that first draft takes me like nine to nine months to a year. And then in between drafts, that's when I will usually focus on the smaller things. I'll write some short stories between Mary and nestlings, I started writing rest stop and kind of split that into like two chunks. And then when I'm waiting for like, notes and edit letters and stuff like that, I'll usually switch to like trying to write a screenplay. I try and write like, one teleplay a year, one one feature length screenplay a year. That didn't happen last year, did it. Now, I don't remember if I wrote a screenplay last year or not. What is time? I don't think I did. I think the last screenplay I wrote was two years ago, but I will try and write like one thing of each a year at least, just to keep, to keep those pipes open and to, you know, like all, like, all things. I think, again, like preaching to the choir here. But I think every novelist also understands the power of incrementalism and how, like, if you can just get something done the next year, you'll look back and you'll have so much more than you thought. And so, like, I was just trying to have, like, one more thing to add to the pile, so that when I need it, I'll have a lot more than I than I might have otherwise. Yeah. So like, I, you know, I try and be multi disciplinary. I try and, you know, finish one thing and then maybe do something in a slightly different medium, be it a short story after writing a novel, or be it a screenplay after writing a short story or something like that, like I try and move from one to the next, and then, as you know, the acting work is just kind of sclerotic, and wherever it wherever it pops up. I mean, you've I know from your conversation with Paul Tremblay, we all know how fucking nasty this industry is right now. How not this the industry, showbiz industry, I should say film industry. It's not good. So things are very, very Hap hazard, very hard to predict, very spits and firts and spurts and ferts and flirts and all sorts of Ono man appeal like that. So between, you know, the pandemic and then the strikes and then the fires like not a lot of auditions are happening anyway. But you know, I will. Still probably get, like, a couple auditions a month that I'll have to do, and I just filmed an episode of Law and Order that's going to air soon. So, like, those things are just very hard to predict and just kind of pop up whenever they pop up. And I'm at once grateful for and annoyed by the opportunity. And that's my

Michael David Wilson 1:00:20
yeah things in Hollywood right now, they're so volatile and oh my god, you know, this is why I say to other writers, if you get anything corruption, if you get any sort of good news, it's like, celebrate the win that you get, celebrate the stage that you're at, but do not leap ahead. Yeah, if you got the option, don't assume you're gonna have a script. If you got the script, don't assume that they're gonna film it. Just celebrate where you are and like rightly so. If you get it option, that is a phenomenal achievement. If they write a script that is, and I, I know, particularly as, like pros, right? As it can be frustrating and almost a bit maddening and puzzling. It's like, hang on, you wrote the script, but it didn't become a film. Yeah, yeah, that's exactly what happened. They

Nat Cassidy 1:01:17
can make the film and then just not released the film, yeah,

Michael David Wilson 1:01:21
I mean that, yeah, yeah, yeah, that. What was that? Was it, oh, was there a Walter Goggins thing where that happened? Was it a Jordan Harper book in my it

Bob Pastorella 1:01:32
was John, yeah. It was uh, LA Confidential. The the pilot for CBS was going to do an LA Confidential with Jordan. Jordan Harper is the show runner. And there's like, one episode, yeah, no one's seen it. Jordan has it, you know? And like, great, great cast. And they're like, Nah, we don't want to do it, yep. And I'm like, you know? And it's like, I'm so in Jordan Harper is that, of course, the news is no spoiler. They're doing brew Baker's criminal on prime. And I'm always checking the news just to make sure it's still on track. Yep, you know? Because, I mean, we almost didn't get a, you know, Sam's lot remake, which we probably didn't need anyway, but anyway,

Nat Cassidy 1:02:25
you know, yeah, yeah, I've done a fair amount of pilots, and none of them have gone through, and it is always so heartbreaking because you a lot of times you don't even get to see them. I did a pilot of it was going to be a show made of a graphic novel written by JT petty, who's Sarah langen. Brilliant novelist Sarah langens husband, really cool graphic novel about werewolves in New York City. And I had a, I had a, you know, one of the, one of the roles in that pilot, one of the recurring roles in that pilot. And all I wanted to do was see it. Like, even if they weren't gonna release it, I was like, I just want to see the werewolves. Let me see what the werewolves look like. And I never got to see it. Never, ever, ever. So it's so sad, but like, there are fucking things like, I, friend of mine, who's an editor out in LA, helped work on the wily coyote movie that, like they made, it's done, and they're just not gonna release it like that is a that's not even a show that needs to be picked up, that's just a movie that everyone who's seen it says, it's great, and it's just sitting on a shelf because it's a tax write off. So the Yeah, Hollywood is is Hollywood has never been kind and it is fucking cool right now. Yeah, it's crazy, but AI is gonna fix it all. We can just have machines make our movies, and they'll be great. They'll really speak to the human condition. It'll be wonderful. And then we can focus on doing work for our companies and making money for the CEOs, and that's all we need to do.

Michael David Wilson 1:04:05
All right, let's lift that video quickly and put that on tick tock. Matt Cassidy comes out as very pro AI for creativity, yep, yep.

Nat Cassidy 1:04:22
I'll say it's a deep fake.

Michael David Wilson 1:04:26
I mean, I mean that they're so realistic these that that is a scary thing. They are so realistic these days. And I must have said this before, but you know, when I was younger, I naively thought, the more access we have to information, the easier it will be to find the truth and to be like, Look, this is objectively true, right? What I didn't anticipate was there would be videos, a very powerful. Or people saying something, and then they would publicly make a statement saying, Oh, I never said that. I didn't say it wasn't said. And people would be like, Well, I mean, if they say no, they said they didn't say it. Guess they didn't. There's a fucking video. Yep, doesn't matter.

Nat Cassidy 1:05:22
Yeah, that's the thing. All you have to do is, like, say it to deep fake. It doesn't have to be a deep fake, but just throwing it out there causes enough deniability. Now, that's a big part of the book that I'm writing right now, too. It's very it's all about AI and deep fakes and stuff like that, because that shit fills me with such spinning existential dread as well. Yeah, it's a very, it's a very hard hole to get out of, I think,

Michael David Wilson 1:05:46
yeah. I mean, one of the things that Chuck Palahniuk said when we were talking about kind of things within this realm and an AI and people feeling threatened, I think the thing that will make you know human books ultimately prevail is actually their imperfections and their deliberate errors. I mean, also, like the soul and the real emotions, because I don't know I feel fabricating them or doing it in an artificial way that there is something missing, and you can discern, and, yeah, of course, you can, you know, very you can do a good, a kind of good interpretation of the human emotion with the right technology. But it there's just something missing, and I think as well, people will gravitate towards wanting the imperfection, wanting the deliberate errors, and that is something that that AI can't replicate.

Nat Cassidy 1:06:50
Yeah, exactly. That's where the lessons are. That's where the spark is, is in those like, weird idiosyncrasies that are that are non algorithmical. They're those. They're those little like weird hiccups and burps and weird sort of things that kind of, by their very definition, are not programmable, like they they're the organic things that happen. Yeah, I 100% agree. And for the record, I'm very anti, very anti billionaire in corporations, just to set the records record straight, since you're gonna pull that clip,

Michael David Wilson 1:07:28
yeah, well, thank goodness that you said that, because it certainly was not implicit throughout all conversation, no and any interaction with you. So I'm glad that you finally made it known

Nat Cassidy 1:07:42
publicly keep my political positions very close to the chest. I'm, uh, I'm, I'm just, I'm great. I don't give much, you know, I'm very, I'm a shrieking violet,

Michael David Wilson 1:07:51
yeah, yeah. You don't want to get political now, to obscurely reference the episode we recorded with Max booth again, although the last time we did it, it was off air. So this is a very bizarre part for the people watching or listening. But what also might have been a disconnect for people, as you know, they're hearing about all the things you do, and then you said, you know, of course, then I go to my day job. Hang on, what you have a day job? On top of all

Nat Cassidy 1:08:29
this, I do too much, although I should say I put in my notice for my day job at the end of last year, so I actually don't have it now. This is the first time in my entire life that I have not had full time employment, you know, accepting, like the great financial crisis and like the the year where I couldn't find any work or anything like that. This is the first time I've, like, voluntarily, not had an additional source of full time income. So a please, please, please, fucking pre order when the wolf comes home. Please. Everybody hearing this, I need it so bad for that book to do well. But yeah, up until the end of last year, I've had a 40 plus hour a week office job on top of on top of it, that I've been working at for like, 15 years. And before that, it was another job. And before that, it was another job. I've had a series of many, many strange jobs. So if you have to have a day job, at least, I've had a very bizarre series of jobs, like I worked at Playboy, I worked at New Line Cinema. I helped close New Line Cinema down. I worked for private detectives. I worked for the divorce lawyers of the mega rich. I've seen some things. I've done weird things, but, yeah, I've always, I've always had to balance that, that full time gig with. If you know doing shows, and you know having to leave for a couple of months to do a play somewhere, or having to take a couple weeks off to shoot a movie, or things like that. So it's I know it sucks. I hate it, but it also feels very weird to not have it right now. So it is, it was very much like a an uncomfortable relationship. But yeah, it's, I think I'm glad you brought it up, because I think it is important to also like remind people that like that is, that is a fact of life for a lot of artists. And I probably could have quit this job sooner, but I wanted to build a little bit more of a financial cushion. And also, like these are much like in Hollywood. Publishing is a very tenuous industry, and it has its ups and downs. It's a very hard thing to, you know, predict and it will seem like the most stable thing one year, and then the next year you're like, oh my god, I might never publish again. So yeah, it's, there's no shame in a day job. And God is it a fucking challenge to bounce,

Michael David Wilson 1:11:17
yeah, and I imagine too, particularly because you were putting on plays and you're doing these acting roles that you probably then had to use your vacation time in your day job to be able to facilitate these other things. So

Nat Cassidy 1:11:33
Well, the trick I did, which I don't recommend but is I, I've never worked a job that had like, perks, so I never had vacation time. It was just basically like, oh, I won't get paid that day. So it was like that sort of mercenary, like, Yes, I have this job. Yes, I have this paycheck, but these other things are my priority. And yes, that means I didn't even get insurance until, like, I was in my late 30s. But, you know, in some ways, they helped me be, like, a little less tethered, at least, like it was, like, I'm only making money to put towards these endeavors anyway. So if I'm gonna be having to work somewhere, I can't work for somewhere that's not going to allow me to have that sort of freedom of movement that I'll need. It'll hurt, it'll hurt my bottom line for sure, to, like, have to take time off to go do a thing, but at least then I won't be like, siloed to just having like, two weeks to do a thing.

Michael David Wilson 1:12:36
Yeah, I've always kind of got full time jobs that would facilitate my creative endeavors. And, you know, from an early age, I've realized that time is far more important than money. So yeah, if there's a reason that I need to take the day off, and I've used a very small amount of vacation days that I have, then I'll just take it unpaid.

Nat Cassidy 1:13:04
Yeah, it's totally worth it.

Michael David Wilson 1:13:11
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RJ Bayley 1:14:30
it was as if the video had unzipped my skin, slunk inside my tapered flesh, and become one with me.

Bob Pastorella 1:14:39
From the creator of This Is Horror. Comes a new nightmare for the digital age. The Girl in the Video by Michael David Wilson, after a teacher receives a weirdly arousing video, his life descends in a paranoia and obsession. More videos follow, each containing information no stranger could possibly know, but who's sending them and what do they want? The answers may destroy everything and everyone. He loves The Girl in the Video is the ring meets fatal attraction from iPhone generation, available now in paperback, ebook and audio

Andrew Love 1:15:09
in 1867 the young Samantha gray marries the infamous Captain Jakes, unleashing a series of brutal horror in this epic splatter Western from Death's Head. Press man Sam, by J, D, grays is a rip roaring tall tale of revenge. Drags a coffin full of gold across the hellscape of reconstruction Texas and explodes at the top of a mountain. You better read this one with the lights on

Michael David Wilson 1:15:38
before I go. If you've got this far, I have a final request of you, and that is, if you are not already subscribed to the This Is Horror YouTube channel, I'd love you to go over to youtube.com, forward slash at This Is Horror Podcast. And just like the channel, it's a great way to support us, and it means that not only can you listen to these podcasts, but you can watch the audio version. I'm doing my best to update it frequently. There's a little bit of a backlog, but there are a lot of great episodes up there, most recently at the time of recording, the conversation with Dan Howarth. We've also got the conversation with Eric la rocker, David Moody, Chuck Palahniuk and LP Hernandez. But I anticipate, at the time that you are listening to this, there will be a video that is more recent than the Dan Howarth one. I can't say which one it is. I'm not Nostradamus, but you can find out by going to youtube.com, forward slash at This Is Horror Podcast. So please do please subscribe. Please support. This Is Horror well, okay, until next time with Max booth. Third, take care of yourselves. Be good to one another. Read horror, keep on writing and have a Great, great day.

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