|
= Newer Works by John T. Cullen =
Latest Writings at Galley City
Read Half Free/Try-Buy Novels Safe/Secure: Easy Price of a Latte
San Diego Noir
Psychological Thriller by John T. Cullen
Creepy Sister A classic literary character study and compelling thriller: prepare for a suspenseful ride full of surprises that creep up on you. Builds slowly, while you engage in the interesting characters and wonder which one is the really creepy one. Which is the good sister? Is it Anna? Or Bella? Or a third woman who enters the picture as part of a double indemnity (murder for insurance) plot? She turns out to be a sister, rather than a wife, as the perps wrap Anna in their plot. When the hammer comes down, you'll see it all at once. Wow. If you are reading on the subway, be sure you're sitting down. Coming live soon. Stand by. JTC.
San Diego Noir Hints of a dark past shimmer under the sunny, balmy surface of sunny San Diego (now a capital of Noir). Remember, Raymond Chandler, creator of the noir detective Philip Marlowe, and one of those classic authors who gave us archetypal Los Angeles Noir, actually lived, wrote, and died in the La Jolla district of San Diego. At the end of a turbulent life, Chandler died penniless and lies buried in Mount Hope Cemetery.
By coincidence, Mount Hope Cemetery (still in operation) was once a potter's field outside San Diego, east on Market Street, where the phonies of 1892 took the corpse of the 'Beautiful Stranger' to dump her in an unmarked grave after huge religious and civil ceremonies in downtown San Diego. Her marker was put in place in the 1990s, but I believe the woman buried there (the true Beautiful Stranger) is Elizabeth 'Lizzie' Wyllie, not the dark grifter Kate Morgan who orchestrated a deadly, failed blackmail plot in 1892 against Hotel del Coronado owner John Spreckels (from a billionaire family of global impact at the time).
I've written at least three books about the 1892 mystery of the Beautiful Stranger in Coronado, a true crime that became a famous ghost legend. My duet Coronado Mystery includes my bestselling dramatization (novel) Lethal Journey closely based on the other work in the duet, nonfiction scholarly analysis Dead Move: Kate Morgan and the Haunting Mystery of Coronado. I'm confident that I have finally solved what has been effectively a cover-up and cold case for well over a century at one of the nation's premier resorts. Coronado is rightfully listed as having the most beautiful beach in North America (the island City of Coronado, across San Diego Bay from the Noir city).
Start reading, but don't get side-tracked from San Diego Noir because you *will* *want* to know which one is the real creepy sister!
Jurassic Yard
Dark Dreams at a Southwestern U.S. Resort
 A Little Nightmare in Your Drink? Four young professional women go on vacation to a lake resort in the western USA. All is beautiful until, one evening amid a hopping bar scene, an evil young sociopath slips a nasty drug in the heroine's drink. Her friends manage to get her back to the hotel, but she slips into a nightmare in which the real world and a dinosaur world (including human monsters) overlap.
It's a fun read, as well as a lesson in how evolution is all around us and we're part of it. Appropriate metaphor as the 21st Century global express train rattles through a long, dark tunnel amid chaos, corruption, and a new medieval age of powerful corporate reptiles (you know who).
Evokes a good bit of history, too, telling how the (Jewish) author of the classic Bambi must have once rubbed shoulders with a silently deranged homeless man in Vienna named Adolf Hitler, pre-World War One. Think of Hitler's eyes, the promise of things to come that horrifying, inhuman stare, and the nightmare world to come. Our English word 'to stare' comes from the German zu starren, from which derives the Yiddish Shtarrker, meaning a madman whose horrific grimace and insane eyes stare a thousand yards into annihilation as he advances on you with raised claws and dripping, smelly tyrannosaur teeth.
|
