Skip to main content

Michael In Hell: The Story History

The YS Gazelle version of what is probably my best work in psychological horror.The story continues in Two Weeks Burning, which I may finish before my time here ends.


I've been reading my own book to help with some of the background in Two Weeks Burning, what will be the last book in the trilogy that includes The Bad Season. I wrote the original story for Michael In Hell in 1973 on a rented IBM Selectric while in my twenties. (Most writers couldn't afford to buy a Selectric outright back then.) 

 The story was called Roll, Roll, about a public stadium execution of a man who had tried to kill his wife on a plane with a gun totally made of plastic and with one frozen ice water bullet. The plan didn't work and he was caught and sentenced to death for the attempted murder of his wife and the killing of a passenger in the next seat because his wife had bent down in her seat to pick up something up the moment he fired.

In the story, his wife visits him in jail hours before his head is to be chopped off. This time, he manages to strangle her, the guards kill him, which creates a bad situation because the headliner for the execution is now dead. Thanks to a rather psychotic warden named Burdeck, the execution goes on as planned using the guard who shot him as a replacement. I guess this story had an undertone of the principle that "money is everything and the show must go on."

 I sent the story to Isaac Asimov's scifi magazine and was shocked when I received a personal note from Mr. Asimov. He told me he loved the story and my depiction of a future society, but didn't think it would work right as a short story and I should expand it into a novel. The result was Michael In Hell, years later, based on my original concept for society in the year 2005. I'm kind of amazed at how some of the societal changes in the United States that I predicted so many years ago have come to pass or are in the process of being put into place.

 I've been away from the actual writing of Michael In Hell for so long that it's like I didn't write it and I'm reading the book for the first time. I'm having a ball with the character. Some of the scenes in the novel are based on actual events in my life. Everything any writer does in fiction is a part of his or her past experience. I'll never admit what events in my life because I've always heard the book scares a lot of women into nightmares. 

 My wife read it while we were going together and told her friends she thought she might be going out with a serial killer. Of course, she found out I wasn't...or did she?

 If I never get anything else out of writing, I enjoy the knowledge that I was able to scare people and put them into my fiction world and make it seem real. I'm sure most all writers would agree that if a book entertains it was worth the effort.

 (That is my face front and back from a 1994 picture. If you turn the back image upside down, you can see an evil face with long hair and hands reaching. The figure seems to be standing in front of a stain glass window. This was not planned, and was pointed out to me later by a reader.)

Michael In Hell

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Vietnam: The Liberty Bridge

(This entry has had a lot of comments, and I'm glad it can help bring Nam vets together or to help find each other. If you have a comment, please attach your name to the comment or from this point forward it won't be published. I've received many comments that are phony and obviously made up, submitted by anonymous submission. I do screen all comments. Click the photo to enlarge. Semper Fi.) This is the Liberty Bridge (click to make larger) in Quang Nam Province in Vietnam during July of 1968. Of the 14,000 Marines killed in Vietnam, 10,000 were killed in Quang Nam Province. (Figures in comment section show a little under 7000 KIA in Quang Nam.) This was late in my tour on July 2. The bridge had been blown once again by the enemy to isolate the Marine base at An Hoa. I was a 50 caliber machine gunner on a convoy to resupply the An Hoa Firebase. I called this the River Styx because it had a ferry boat. Once you crossed the river you entered a nightmare hell on earth cal
249 comments
Read more

The Jesus Moth

Photo taken through a window screen. I had just gone over the first print copy of The Bad Season on July 22, 2006. I walked over to the window and saw this moth on my outside air conditioner unit. It was the most bizarre thing I had seen in a long time. I retrieved my digital camera and snapped a picture through the glass and the window screen before going outside in a failed to attempt to capture the moth. I contacted a moth expert. He told me what kind of moth it was, but added that he had never seen one with a cross on its back like this one. I call it the Jesus Moth, the Crusader Moth, or maybe the Infidel Moth. The syndicates wanted me to give it to them for free. They said they don't take pics from non-employees because "we would actually have to pay you for it."   Hmm, what a novel concept, getting paid for something. I offered to swap for a syndicated story about my book. They refused. So I copyrighted the entire pic (the one below is a fragment from that p
28 comments
Read more

The Old Corps: Marine Corps Boot Camp 1966

BLT 1/3 USMC 1967 Vietnam Boot Camp Hell I recently saw a video of what I assume was the current Marine Corps Boot Camp. It mentioned recruits reporting any abuse right away and the DI was trying to be tough (and he did sound tough to an extent), but underneath it all you could tell the old Corps was gone in the civilian desire (political desire by people who never served) to make things easier and less traumatic for the boots. They never mentioned abuse to us in 1966 because we were abused 24/7. I'm an old Corps Hollywood Marine (that's an inside Marine joke about the difference between boot camp in Parris Island or San Diego.) The boots in Parris Island claimed they had it rougher because they had swamps. The Hollywood Marines had mountains. I would rather walk in water than climb mountains so I disagree. I entered the Marine Corps on August 10, 1966. Marines had been in Vietnam for over a year. All of us would probably go to Nam. For some of us it woul
Post a Comment
Read more