Dennis Latham: Life, Fiction, and the Pursuit of Madness

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 h

How much is this bill really worth? What Is A Deficit And Why Are You Not Concerned? I don't know anyone who is concerned about a deficit (other than their own), and I never hear anyone say something like, "Man, I won't eat all this week just so I can send the money to the government to help the deficit." I've been hearing about the deficit all my life and nothing changes. The cost of living has never gone down and never will. We've always had a government that spends money like crazy. We've always had poor people and we always will. Right now, it seems the government is trying to get rid of the working class and make everyone either rich or poor and government dependent. I've never studied economics for very long. I did once as an extra course in college and I hated it. I went to two lectures and dropped the class because the teachers were full of nonsense. You had people who had never been out of school telling students how l

Vietnam Tet Offensive 1968 (original pictures first time posted anywhere) Pictures from Vietnam Tet Offensive 1968 (click to enlarge photos) Marine Corps Vietnam/ Tet Offensive 1968 Camp Books north of Danang during Tet 1968. 122 mm rockets fired into base almost daily. Sometimes several times a day, and a lot at night. You either lived or you died. Each rocket was six feet long and carried 40 pounds of TNT. It could explode on impact or be delayed to bury in the soil and then explode. All the shrapnel usually went forward from the blast so if it passed over your head before impact, you were usually safe. (You c ould be KIA or injured by blast, too. I had a Timex watch and my left arm was outside the bunker when a rocket exploded. The watch stopped at 6:00 and could not be fixed.) They sounded like freight trains coming at you. If the train sound passed over you, you waited for the blast on impact. If the train sound stopped like it was cut off, you we

The cover represents the crucifixion of Christ on Calvary. The bent cross represents my twisted telling of the Second Coming. The wall is from an actual building that caught fire and burned to the ground. It was rumored that demons did it. “ Lord of Homicides was my return to a type novel I felt comfortable writing. I take an idea and imagine how I would write the story if I was totally nuts. My heroes are usually losers striving to change their lives.   This novel started during an attempt to explain why normal people suddenly commit horrible crimes against innocent strangers: school attacks, restaurant shootings, and unexplained murder. I created my often bizarre and comic view of the dimension we sometimes see when things dart past the corners of our eyes: the realm of psychotic demons and paranoid angels.” The Summary Lord of Homicides explains why normal people commit sudden horrible crimes; based on the concept that all humans are born with good traits and commit

My novella, Bad Night In The Holding Cell , is based on a night I spent in the Cincinnati Justice Center back in 1987. The internal description of the Justice Center is exactly how I remember it. You could smoke in jail then, so if you had cigarettes, you could be a popular man in the holding cell. This was a no frills jail for sure, and if you had to take a dump, you had to do it in public where the jailers and everyone in the holding cell could share your adventure. A bare toilet with one of those torpedo tube sounding flushers, and where you were the main act, could constipate even hardened criminals. I was used to going in public because in Marine Corps Boot Camp, we had to use lines of bare toilets with no walls in between them for privacy. When I was in Vietnam, the Vietnamese dropped their pants and went where ever they happened to be standing. But for an American at home, public toilets with an audience was not the normal life event. The prisoners in the story ex

    He writes things down... after they bump the walls inside his head. The book that will make you  laugh out loud. Suddenly... Dennis Latham's This Crazy Life (Ask for it at your favorite bookstore online or off.)                                           

Vietnam Shrine      My family doctor outside the VA is someone I see on an emergency basis when I feel that I won’t be able to get a VA appointment in a timely manner.   Her family is from Egypt but she has been here forever and considers herself American and loves our country. She is older than me and very wise, and we have long talks about everything. She gave me some advice.   “Stop watching the news,” she said. “This isn’t the America we knew. These people are all crazy. We don’t even go back home to see relatives anymore because they are all crazy in Egypt, too.”   This is great advice. I’ve tried not to get angry about things since she told me that. Sometimes, even an old Nam vet needs someone to give him directions. She could be a Gunny.      Then she told me about her trip to Vietnam with her husband. She said it’s all North Vietnam now and looks nothing like it did when Americans were there during the war.   She also told me she saw something that re

Once you get to the wedding it's worth the trip. This very short excerpt is from my novel Is Everybody Nuts? Spam Peckerpaw (Sam Peckinpah) the film director, and Schreve McBean (Steve McQueen) famous actor, search for the man in red robes and a giant rubber ball that blew up their World War 2 movie set. I wrote this novel in 1973 and kept it typed in a box for 40 years. (I sent a letter to the CEO of Putnam, one of the big publishers of the day, telling him he could make money off this book and I wanted someone to read it. A typical tyro mistake, but every writer makes them. He called me and wanted to know how I got his name and address. I told him I went to the library and looked him up in a corporate CEO book. It had been simple, really. I wondered how he made it to CEO. He guaranteed me someone would read it. The box came back a year later squashed flat with tire marks. So much for the visionary attitude of publishing at the time. Ha-ha. So it stayed in