Prologue to ‘Night of the Superstorm’

Night of the Superstorm is due for release Feb. 3, 2014, and it is on schedule, Lord willing and the creek don’t rise. Here is how it all starts in this story I’m calling “Gilligan’s Island meets Key Largo.”

And if I may be so bold, while you’re waiting you can catch up by loading up your Kindle with The Song of the Serial Kisser, Firespiders and Invasion of the Body Borrowers.

What’s that? You prefer .epub? Understood. Wait a few days.

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Prologue

It was a dark and stormy night.

What?

OK, genius, you think you’re so smart – you tell me how to describe the night. It was long after sunset, ergo it was dark outside. And the storm was hellacious enough to wake the dead – trees were crashing onto power lines, cars were getting swamped in high water, and the winds were howling. Howling, I tell you.

You know how the wind drives against your house so hard that it sounds like an oldtime movie about people trapped in a house on a dark and stormy night? That’s how dark and stormy it was.

So don’t roll your eyes at me when I tell you it was a dark and stormy night. Because it was dark, it was stormy, and it was night.

I’m sorry, I guess I’m a little touchy tonight. It’s dark and stormy outside now, and it kind of reminds me about the night of the superstorm.

How about this: It was so dark and so stormy that even Myke Phoenix, the mighty protector of Astor City, looked out into the dark, poured himself a cup of hot chocolate, and closed the curtains. Well, technically it was Paul Phillips, the mere mortal who occasionally became Mychus the Warrior, who decided he was going to settle in front of the television set rather than go out in the storm.

The television meteorologist grinned back at him and confirmed his instincts.

“Batten down the hatches and strap yourself in,” she chirped. “It’s going to be a bumpy ride. It’s a dark and stormy night, just like a bad old novel.”

“Bad old novel”? Everybody’s a critic.

Twelve hours later, there was no grinning and no chirping in Astor City. But it certainly was a bumpy ride, which began when Paul realized his wife was not coming home that night.

5 things you may not know about Myke Phoenix

Invasion of the Body Borrowers, the seventh Myke Phoenix story to be published and the third in the new series of 12 stories that will be completed in 2014, should be “live” in the Amazon Kindle Store by this time Monday, Jan. 6. Here are five random tidbits about Myke’s creation that you may or may not have gathered.

1. When I created Myke around 1990, I was a season ticket holder for the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay men’s basketball team, the Fighting Phoenix.

2. Astor City is vaguely patterned after Green Bay, Wis., a medium-sized city where two rivers meet downtown, but none of the buildings or locations in Astor City correspond to the real town.

3. OK, that’s not quite true. “Carlson’s Pretty Neat Antiques,” where Paul Phillips first encounters the Soulkeeper of Kiribati in the Myke Phoenix origin story, might bear some resemblance to Ralph’s Old Tyme Piano Co. aka Ralph’s Antiques & Phonographs.

4. Myke’s habit of exclaiming “Hokey smokes” and the various other expletives that appear in the series are direct descendents of William Harper “Johnny” Littlejohn, archaeologist and aide to Doc Savage, who was known to cry, “I’ll be superamalgamated!” from time to time.

5. It Came From Outer Space was one of my favorite movies as a youth, and Ray Bradbury was my favorite author, but it wasn’t until years later that I realized Bradbury had written that movie.

And what No. 5 might have to do with Myke Phoenix will have to wait until the release of Invasion of the Body Borrowers. The good news is that’s less than 24 hours as of this writing!