The Bad Season Origin

The cover for the current book.

The Bad Season Origin

When I was eighteen and worked the night shift for the post office in Cincinnati, we used to get breaks every three hours, to smoke, go to the bathroom or whatever. A lot of guys went to the bar across the street for drinks. (I could imagine what would happen if someone did that now. In many ways, society has been regressing to something like Puritan society.)

The Postal Annex is still there, but the bar is long gone. One morning I went to the bar across the street with another guy from work. He told me a story about Harlan County Kentucky. He said when he was fourteen his grandfather died, and he stayed with his grandmother that summer to help her. The house had a root cellar with huge heavy doors. The first night he was there something came and broke into the root cellar. They put a heavy padlock and chain on the door. The next night the thing tore the door off the hinges, a feat beyond human strength. My friend went to get his grandfather's gun, and his grandmother pleaded with him not to go outside because the gun wouldn't matter. He took her advice. The next day neighbors came and fixed the door. They told my friend it was that thing down in the hollow, and when it came up from the hollow, nothing could stop it.

(The basic idea came from this story about a thing in the hollow.)

The rest of the story idea came when I was looking at a log cabin in Owenton, Kentucky. The new cabin had been built against the side of a hill overlooking a hollow. The back steps were gone, like they had been torn off. The price was too good so I asked the realtor why. He said something bad had happened there to a child and the family moved out. I tied the two stories together as a basis for the novel The Bad Season, which put my Marine protagonist, David Larkins, in direct conflict with a thing that couldn't die in the Owenton Hollow.

Owenton Hollow Nightmare