While work on my new-look website continues – thanks to Jungle Jonathan Wooley, the hardest-working webmaster in the business – I have to take just a few paragraphs here to let you know that March 2011 has just become the biggest month ever for me in my writing career (such as it is).

– First, on March 15, John Wiley & Sons officially released my new biography: Wes Craven – the Man and His Nightmares. I was a fan of Craven even before he optioned (but, unfortunately, never filmed) my novel Old Fears, which Ron Wolfe and I co-wrote back in the early ‘80s, so getting to do this project was a real joy for me. As it unfolded, I found myself in a position to write about things that have been kicking around in my head for decades, ideas having to do with the connections between art and exploitation, for instance, as well as what youthful exposure to the concept of an endless, burning hell full of tortured souls might have on a writer or filmmaker. I’m proud of the book, proud of the exhaustive research I was able to utilize (unearthed mostly by one of the best researchers in the business, Rachelle Vaughan), proud of the fact that Wes Craven himself consented to a pretty thorough interview. Plus, it’s my first book to be available on Kindle!

–Next comes Shot in Oklahoma: A Century of Sooner State Cinema, my look at the history of Oklahoma filmmaking, from the University of Oklahoma Press.  Beginning at the very first part of the 20^th Century, when Edison’s boys headed down from New Jersey to get some authentic cowboys and Indians in front of their lenses, it wraps up with a look at several of the theatrical features that came along in the wake of the Movie That Changed Everything, the Tulsa-lensed Blood Cult. Acknowledging that picture’s rightful place in film history – it was actually the first made-for-home-video feature — was especially important to me. Of course, it was fun to write about as well, as were such off-trail movies as Just Between Us, This Stuff’ll Kill Ya, and the amazing Prince of Peace.

I was able to do lots of new interviews – with famed novelist S.E. Hinton, for instance, as well as Godfather of Gore Herschell Gordon Lewis – and those complement the great you-are-there stories I dug out of newspaper accounts stretching back to the 1910s. The good folks at the Tulsa World, my erstwhile place of employment, allowed me access to their extensive library (or morgue, in classic newspaper slang), which helped the book immensely.

– Finally, my longtime pal and collaborator Michael H. Price invited me aboard for the newest entry in his long-running and acclaimed Forgotten Horrors series of movie books. Forgotten Horrors Vol, 5:  The Atom Age. Once again propelled by the Lovecraftian notion of horror being where you find it, and focusing as always on small-budget productions, volume 5 covers the years 1949 through 1954 and includes fresh takes on many of the usual suspects (Ghost Chasers, Robot Monster, and the cover-featured Man from Planet X) as well as the less-obvious likes of She’s Too Mean for Me, It’s A Small World, and Skipalong Rosenbloom.

Released in mid-March by Cremo Studios,  it’s 300-plus pages of the good, the bad, and the exceedingly strange, bound together by Michael’s insight, wit, and intriguingly skewed vision, with assists by yours truly and Jan Alan Henderson, whose work I’ve long admired. It’s available on amazon.com, among other places.

As far as published output goes, I’ll probably never have another month like March 2011. I’m happy and thankful to have those three books out, and I hope that whoever reads this might find one – or more – to his or her liking.

As always, thanks for the support!

– JW