Dave's Fiction Warehouse

W hen we first moved to this old neighborhood in Northeast Florida, I decided to hang an American flag out front. Not for patriotic reasons, really; it’s just that the previous owners had one, and this is a historic area where Old Glory on the front porch kind of fits the vibe. Florida’s heat and rain and humidity are hard on flags. I replaced mine for the first time a few years ago. This summer, I saw it was time to replace it again. Some of the stitching had come undone along the middle stripe, and flag hung in two, like a cavalry guidon after a long battle. Now there’s a metaphor. As before, I ordered another from Amazon. When it arrived I let it hang inside for awhile to get rid of the fold wrinkles. I meant to hang it back on the porch the next day. But that day, the president committed some new outrage, after a long summer of them — I forget what exactly; it is the nature of this presidency that you really can’t remember much past four or five outrages ago. I thought: “Actually, ...

T oo soon for Halloween? No way! Not when Costco and Walmart are already jam-packed with Christmas crap on October 1. I wanted to mention a podcast I’ve been enjoying in the run-up to All Hallow’s Eve: “ Spooked .” Every Thursday, the podcast features regular people talking about eerie stuff that has happened to them. You know, spectral visitors and phantom hitchhikers and an assortment of unexplained phenomena. Some of it is obvious bullshit, sure, but I do not discriminate. The best part of the show is host Glynn Washington setting the stage with strange occurences from his own childhood. I love this kind of thing. Yes, I’ll admit that a number of episodes seem suspiciously similar to well-known works of horror fiction. But somehow, hearing the stories narrated by ordinary people makes them more compelling. The episodes remind me of when I was a kid, sitting around listening to the adults in my family talk about eerie occurrences. I had an uncle who subscribed to Fate magazine . He k...

I know; it’s been awhile. The Trump nightmare keeps getting darker, and writing about anything else has seemed frivolous. But life goes on. I am just determined to outlive this bastard, to dance rhetorically on his grave when all this passes, as it must. So I’ve deleted Facebook and Twitter from my phone again, and I’ve resumed writing fiction. Rewriting it, too. Recently I decided to repackage all my published short stories into a single volume, and put it on Amazon as an e-book. I realized there aren’t quite enough of them to make a book, so I’ve written a couple more. In the process, I’ve gone through all the published stories and polished them to a showroom sheen. At times I’ve been embarrassed at how poorly some of them were edited before appearing in “Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.” That’s on me, not the magazine. A few weeks from now, the Kindle book should be on the market. I’m calling it The Least Best Place. It’s the title of one of my favorites stories, which first appear...

There's a quintet to draw to T ake a look at the composite picture above: What do the five faces have in common? I’ll just wait here while you ponder. Hint: It’s not the Dave Clark Five. It’s not the Five Amigos. It’s not the Five Horsemen of the Apocalypse. It’s not the Five Guys. It’s not the Five Pillars of Islam. No, my friends, these five faces represent the closest resemblance to yours truly, according the Google Arts and Culture app that’s been wasting a ton of bandwidth on social media over the last few weeks. I saw a story about this stupid app and downloaded it today. I thought it might be fun to see which famous painting would have a guy who looked like me. Yeah, real fun. I should point out that the image on the left is the one that came up first. As you can see, things didn’t improve much over the next four tries. As the kids would say: WTF? Not that it matters, but the reference image is my profile image: a selfie that, like all of them, fails to capture the essence o...

I f you’ve ever thought America is going to hell in a handbasket — and who among us hasn’t? — take a trip back to the mid-19th century and see how you like it then. That’s what I’ve been doing since the first of the year: Reading Ron Chernow’s 960-page biography of Ulysses S. Grant. I’ve learned a lot from “Grant,” but mostly this: Crises and cataclysms come and go, and so do the people who make them. America is better now than it was then. History has a way of undoing the truly corrupt, the truly stupid, the truly amoral. It just takes longer than we’d like. As I said, this book is just south of a thousand pages, so I won’t attempt to encapsulate it. I will mention a few things that I found interesting: Grant was a failure at most everything he did, except warfare. Just a year before the outbreak of the Civil War, he’d been reduced to working for his younger brother in his father’s leather-goods store. During the war, Grant personally knew nearly every Confederate general he faced in...

L ast night we headed for bed just before midnight. The New Year’s Eve gunfire was like the opening battle scene in “Saving Private Ryan,” to the point that the dog followed us upstairs to cower by the bed. My wife asked me what my hopes for 2018 might be. She asks things like that. I hadn’t thought much about it, but the answer came pretty quickly: “To see Donald Trump driven from office in disgrace.” I don’t know if that says more about me, or more about Trump. Is my life so barren that I should for the first time in my life care that much who occupies the White House? Or is this president so loathsome in every respect that his ouster should be my fondest wish? Obviously, I’m going with the latter. Trump cast a pall over pretty much every day last year, a thickening miasma of dread and disgust that all the late-night comics in the world couldn’t quite dispel. I woke up in the morning with minor hopes and dreams, and every day there was some new outrage concerning Trump and his terrib...