MICHAEL SLADE'S 14 THRILLERS +1
Headhunter
In 1978, I took a 3,350-mile road trip around Britain. On arriving in York, I could have bowled down the streets at night and not hit anyone. The Yorkshire Ripper was loose. That inspired me to release a headhunting psycho in my home town, and on the day I began writing, the Clifford Olson case broke. The Mounties were investigating eleven serial killings, so I fictionalized their manhunt.
Ghoul
Alice Cooper praised HEADHUNTER and invited me backstage. That spawned Slade's rock 'n' roll thriller. It plays off allegations that rock drove real-life psychos to kill: AC/DC's HIGHWAY TO HELL and the Night Stalker; the Beatles' "Helter Skelter" and the Manson Family; and so on. It's my homage to Lovecraft.
Cutthroat
Time for a Monster Mash. Bigfoot and the Windigo will do. To suspend disbelief, let's start with the Zodiac killer, bring back the Mad Mountie for Custer's Last Stand, and serve up the culinary tastes of China. We're hunting the Missing Link in human evolution.
Ripper
In 1962, my mom took me to London. Once I mastered the Underground, I went searching for Jack the Ripper's killing sites. In 1967, Scotland Yard let me into the Black Museum. This plot grew out of that: a carnival of carnage on Deadman's Island, with killing machines. It's my take on Agatha Christie's classic AND THEN THERE WERE NONE.
Evil Eye
My all-time favorite battle is the Defense of Rorke's Drift. A hundred British Redcoats against 4,000 African Zulus who must either rip out their guts or go without sex for years. That provides the juju for a modern psycho who is disemboweling Mounties, and took me on safari to Zimbabwe and the Okavango Delta of Botswana to act out the naked prey chase.
Primal Scream
There was to be no sequel to HEADHUNTER. Readers disagreed. Finally, to silence the persistent question, "What about Sparky?" (the killer's name came from a real mad dog that attacked me when I was five), I wrote this tale of a psychotic archer hunting "bum boys" in the snowy Northern woods. It's based on a real Canadian skull-crusher who sodomized American tourists because the U.S. Army rejected him as "too violent" to fight in Vietnam.
Burnt Bones
Sherlock Holmes has Moriarty. The 87th Precinct the Deaf Man. Let's give the Mounties an arch nemesis: Mephisto. My early trips to Stonehenge were when you could still walk among the megaliths. The search here goes back to Colosseum gladiators, Hadrian's Wall, headhunting Picts, and those sneaky Campbells who butchered my ancestors at Glencoe.
Hangman
As a lawyer, I argued the last hanging case in the Supreme Court: a cop killing "for fun." The State of Washington retains the gallows. That gave me the setup for a cross-border jury killer who plays the game of Hangman in reverse with the police. A wrong guess sees the next victim lose an extra limb.
Death's Door
In 1977, I climbed illegally to the top of the Great Pyramid of Cheops in Egypt. What a view! And almost got pushed off by a gang of Cairo street punks. That gave me the mummy plot for the return of Mephisto. A plastic surgeon gone mad. Some say this book's darker than GHOUL.
Bed of Nails
Slade's cannibal feast. I was a Guest of Honor at the World Horror Convention in Seattle, 2001. The outside world worries we're a bunch of bloodthirsty freaks. Playing to that dread - and setting a novel at the WHC - was too delicious to resist. To experience the climax, I flew to the Cook Islands in the South Pacific, and talked my way into Atiu's secret skeleton cave.
Swastika
My mom died in 2003. In cleaning out her house, I found my dad's Bomber Command archive. He flew 47 combat missions against the Nazis, with 2-in-100 odds of surviving, and trained the crews that struck SS Sturmbannfuhrer Wernher von Braun's V2 rocket factory at Peenemunde. Twenty thousand prisoners of war died in the concentration camp that built his missiles so I could watch von Braun - as a whitewashed Tomorrowland hero - on Disney's TV show as a boy. The secret behind the Roswell Incident.
Kamikaze
My mom nursed in the Pacific during the war. At university, I delved into the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. There's a strong motive for revenge. A Japanese soldier lost three generations to the blast, and was sterilized by radiation. Now head of the Yakuza, he suicide-crashes the Pacific War Vets' Convention so the Sushi Chef can fillet a surviving crewman of the Enola Gay.
Crucified
The death of my dad when I was nine shook my faith in God. The real-life Beasts of Satan trial has the Vatican training exorcists by the hundreds. CRUCIFIED is a Christian's worst nightmare come true. Golgotha, the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Witch Hunt, Satanism, the Reichskonkordat, and a trial lawyer's eye for the Achilles heel.
Red Snow
Revenge is a dish best served cold.
13 Tombes
Slade's first publication - in a limited edition of 1 copy - when he was 12. In hindsight, his detective, Daryl Tombe, should have been Daryl Tomb. But you can't change history.
