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

The old Park Show looked different in the 50s. This picture was taken a few years ago.   The Park Show Around 1956, everyone used to go to the old Park Show, right across from the Park Chili in Cincinnati's Northside. It cost 25 cents to get in, and they always had cartoons or serials between the shows. They even sold dried fish in the movies back then (strange days), and they had ushers who were older teenagers and usually real dicks. On Saturday they would sometimes advertise a free box of candy if you came to the Park Show for the matinee. When you got there, it would cost 30 cents to get in instead of 25 cents, and they would give you a nickel box of candy for your free candy. They pulled that scam forever and no one ever said anything. No one really cared, and it was the only place around. There were no adults at the Park Show on Saturday because it was like kid psycho paradise. The place would be packed. The bathroom was full of kids smoking and sometimes fighting. ...

The original title was Driving With Ace. It's a bizarre comedy. Last Chance Of  A Crazy Virgin (Story behind the non-politically correct story) I wrote the first words of this novel on the back porch of a farm in rural Rebecca, Georgia in 1977. I had a pen and a yellow pad, and the sun was just coming up over the lake behind the house. I didn't live there. I had been living out of a suitcase for the past two years while singing in a road band. I was 30, in between gigs, in a place I had never been with a 24-year-old Georgia Peach named Debbie who was so stunning it hurt your soul just to look at her. She was also crazy as hell. She coached me on how to conduct myself with her parents by being nice and polite. So, I was surprised when I walked in with her and she said: "Mom and Dad, this is Dennis. We sleep together in the same bed and we will sleep together in this house in the same bed." That was it. I about fell over. Her parents nodded and smile...

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 com...

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...