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What can I say? It was the mid-Eighties. They were publishing four or five paperback original horror novels a month back then. You could walk into any drugstore in America, and there they'd be -- the latest from Tor, Zebra, Leisure, Dell Abyss, plus reprints from Big-Time Best-seller Houses. I figured, "Hey, I could write one of those." My interest wasn't simply mercenary. I genuinely love horror fiction. A quick tour through the rest of this site will prove that assertion. So it wasn't unreasonable for me to aspire to have my name embossed in scarlet letters on a $3.99 paperback with a jet-black cover. I wrote Crossroads and started marketing it in 1989, just as the horror market started its precipitous slide, from which it has yet to recover. A couple of editors read the manuscript and had some mildly kind things to say about it, but it didn't sell. I can see perfectly well why now. The hardcopy of the text has been stored at the back of my closet for nearly eight years, but I recently had the brainstorm to offer it up to the Web as an online novel. (I mean, the Internet is supposed to free us struggling artists from the censorious tyranny of the monolithic, multinational publishing monopoly, right?) I do so with a number of reservations. I'm not the writer I was ten years ago (thank god), and there is much about Crossroads that is awkward, dated, derivative and just plain dumb. But I also harbor a certain fondness for the novel and would like to share it with more readers. Take a look, and see if Crossroads does anything for you. If you have any kind of reaction at all, please drop me a note at alvoberr@slip.net. I really would enjoy learning your opinion.
CHEAP IRONIES | THE MOVING FINGER (c) 1997 by Michael Berry All rights reserved. Don't make me hurt you.
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