Last Monday, I introduced my “Three Weeks of Halloween” theme. As I noted then, many of the books I’ve published have a horror element though I’ve tried to avoid the excesses of the genre. This week, my posts will be related to a book called Chinchuba which is the only book I’ve published for another author. I first encountered the manuscript back in 2005. I had already published Intrepid Force, Intrepid Force: Invasion, and The Sign of the Sword when Mike Casey, one of my friends from graduate school, contacted me about a project he was working on. Mike was a finance professor, but he had written some fiction books he was thinking about self-publishing. One of them was a horror novel called Chinchuba. The title, he explained, came from a Native American word. He sent me the novel, and I read it.
I immediately liked his readable style. It was both descriptive and easy to read. I also liked his setting. This story took place in the swamps of coastal Mississippi and in the New Orleans French Quarter. I had visited some of the same places in Intrepid Force. I wondered, in fact, if some people would think Mike was me writing under a different name. The story had a colorful and well-drawn set of characters: an estranged couple who were still in love, a dedicated police officer investigating a string of mysterious deaths, a terrifying voodoo priest, and a street evangelist who did good work in bad places. His settings included a set of Indian mounds that was located right beside a NASA facility–the ancient and modern co-existing, one of New Orleans’ above-ground cemeteries, rural homes located on the edges of swamps. And then there was the Chinchuba itself, the mysterious and terrifying entity from which the novel derives its name.
After reading Mike’s novel, I offered to design the cover and publish it for him, and the rest is history. Like the first editions of my novels, this one may need a revision or two in spots, but I found it to be a fun and interesting book to read. It also has some fascinating links to the history, legend, and zoology (in the case of the chinchuba, at least) of New Orleans and coastal Mississippi that we’ll be exploring in the next few days.
