SoulFire77's blog

After a long time in the drawer, my novel Son of September is out. It's available now on Amazon for Kindle, with a paperback to follow. The summer of 1991, two foster children in South Florida start hearing a voice through equipment that should be dead. It tells them what's coming, and the day it arrives, and that they're the only two placed to stop it. What follows is nine years of getting them ready — and the slow question of who they become...

Filed by Fletcher Moody — Literary Correspondent They sent me into the mountains above San José de Purúa in the spring of 1948 to find a man who had spent twenty years making sure no one could. His name, on the books, was B. Traven. He had written The Death Ship and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and ten other novels that sold in the millions across a dozen languages, and nobody who published him or paid him could tell you who he was. He...

Filed by Fletcher Moody — Literary Correspondent I was in Jackson, Mississippi, in June of 1963 to write a soft piece about the libraries of the New South for a quarterly that folded before it could run it, and I have never been able to make that errand seem like anything at all next to what the city became while I was in it. Medgar Evers was shot in the back as he stepped out of his car at his home a little after midnight on the twelfth. He was...

"They were in the hallway, between the second and third bedrooms, when he saw the door. It was on the left side, set into the wall between the linen closet and the bathroom. A six-panel door, same as every other door in the house - same paint, same hardware, same brass knob. It was not remarkable. It was a door in a hallway in a house, and the only reason Philip stopped was that the floorplan in the listing had shown a linen closet here, and the...

Filed by Fletcher Moody — Literary Correspondent You could hear the farm before you could see it. I had driven out from Milledgeville in the middle of a Georgia afternoon, in the kind of heat that gets into the upholstery, and a half mile short of the place a sound came across the fields that I took at first for a woman calling from a long way off. It came again. It was not a woman. By the time the house showed itself, white and low behind a...

Filed by Fletcher Moody — Literary Correspondent I went up to the Bronx to give Dorothy Parker the last word, and could not find a place to leave it. I make a practice of the last word. It is the one advantage the living hold over the famous dead, and I have collected it my whole career, standing at this grave and that one with something prepared, saying over a stone the thing the person never let me say to their face. Parker never let anyone...

Filed by Fletcher Moody — Literary Correspondent I was sent to La Honda, California, on April 23, 1965, to cover a police raid on the home of a novelist named Ken Kesey. Kesey had written two novels by then, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion. The first had made him famous and paid for a log-and-stone house in a stand of redwoods in the Santa Cruz Mountains, where he kept a kind of permanent open house. The young people...

Filed by Fletcher Moody — Literary Correspondent I found the name before I found the boy. It was the summer of 1839, the week of the Fourth, and I was in Liverpool stringing waterfront news for a paper in New York that wanted arrivals, cargoes, and the occasional face worth a paragraph. I read the crew articles the way other men read the racing sheets. On the list of the St. Lawrence , down past the able seamen, among the boys and the ordinary...

Does anyone here like card games? I have created an original card game called Thirteen Cabins . It is played with a standard deck of cards. It's theme is based on the "killer at summer camp" trope most commonly identified with the "Friday the 13th" movie series, but has existed since, at least, The Hardy Boys novels. Theme aside, Thirteen Cabins is one of the most unique card games that can be played without using a special deck (i.e. Magic the...

Filed by Fletcher Moody — Literary Correspondent For most of my career I have been refused. Ignored, deceived, shut out, looked through. I had come to think of it as the natural condition of my profession — that the writer and the correspondent stand on opposite sides of a glass, and the glass does not open. Then, at a literary reception in London in the mid-1960s, Patricia Highsmith agreed to talk to me, and I learned that there are worse...