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

Could this frog be a terrorist? I grew up in a neighborhood called Northside during the 50s. When I was a kid, maybe ten or eleven, they had a Northside Day at a place called Stricker's Grove. I rode out with one of my friends' Dad. Since it was in the 50s, all the girls had those long skirts, some of them were poofy like hoop skirts. All the older guys looked like hoods with duck tails and cigarettes dangling. Anyway, we were doing kids stuff, trying to peek in the girls john and running around like nuts. I found this giant frog, and we let it go near dark underneath the main shelter on the dance floor while a bunch of couples were dancing. The frog got under some girl's skirt and jumped up in her crotch or somewhere between her legs. She screamed like in a horror movie and her boyfriend thought the guy behind her had grabbed her butt and he punched him. That started one hell of a fight involving 20 or 30 hoods while we were trying to act innocent and find the...

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...