HOW DO YOU TELL THE WOMAN YOU LOVE YOUR DAD IS A SERIAL KILLER? Paperback, ebook, and hardcover on sale sale now wherever you buy books or directly from WordFire Press. A horrifyingly hilarious small-town crime thriller about a serial killer’s son who longs for love, but fears he will follow in his father’s footsteps.
NOVEL-LENGTH FICTION (short fiction follows below)
THE SERIAL KILLER’S SON TAKES A WIFE
On sale now wherever you buy books or directly from WordFire Press!
What’s it about? We hesitate to give away much, but we can give you this trailer…
SURVIVAL TIPS FOR SONS OF SERIAL KILLERS
1. Change your last name. Be forgettable.
2. Take comfort. Serial killing is not hereditary. Not usually, anyhow.
3. Never contact your parents, whether on Death Row or elsewhere. You are messed up enough.
4. Choose a dull career. Run an ice cream parlor, for instance.
5. Do not fall in love. Sooner or later, she will ask to meet your mom and dad.
6. Trust no one. Not even her.
7. Do not get married. It cannot end well.
8. Keep what you know to yourself. You were just a kid, after all.
9. Do not return to your boyhood home. No one has forgotten anything.
SURVIVAL TIPS FOR READERS
1. Watch your back.
2. Lock your doors.
3. Be courteous to everyone. Yes, everyone.
This is your only warning!
Opening Lines: You hold in your hands the only authorized and true account of what went down before, during, and after the Hillsdale incident. Accept no imitations. Any other purported version is the product of a fast-buck artist’s feeble imagination, cobbled together from rumors, lies, and hogwash. Nobody has told this story or will tell this story the way I tell this story, because this is my story.
Reviews:
“One of my favorite things about Libling’s writing has always been his voice — chummy, wisecracking, cynical — and The Serial Killer’s Son Takes a Wife takes full advantage of its marvelous capacity for misdirection. His prose is deceptively simple and smooth. It slips between your ribs like a stiletto. Before you know what’s happening, you’re laughing or bleeding or both.” —William Shunn, Main Wish Null
“Welcome to hell in all its glory. Here is madness and mayhem. The characters in the book are wonderful in their comic insanity. There are gasps and giggles. The book is one of a kind… I would love to see this book as a movie because it becomes a great visual in your head while you read from page to page. I couldn’t put it down… I want more books like this and I want more books written by Michael Libling…Do yourself a favour and order this book…It is perfect for over the holidays when you want something a little less family friendly.” —Deb Usher, Arabella Magazine
“It is a turn-the-page-if-you-dare first-person narrative from the point of view of a bitter boy-turned-man, the titular serial killer’s son, Bobby Blessing (born Dickens), who was raised in a world where ‘bad things happen to bad people and worse things happen to good people.’ …The Serial Killer’s Son Takes a Wife is as fun as it is titillatingly horrifying, with references to current rock bands, TV shows, and movies, and at least one reference to the “Chinese virus hoax.” The reader is yanked from one chapter to the next, cliff-hanger to cliff-hanger, until reader and protagonist meet in the dark, one as blind as the other as to what happens next.” —Dan Laxer, The Suburban
“Libling gives the reader a chilling reading experience into the world of a serial killer that rates up there with a best selling true crime book or a Dateline NBC special… So Hannibal Lecter, Leatherface, Norman Bates and Jason, meet your newest contemporary in Henry Taylor Dickens, and his son Bobby, who so vainly tried to get out of living in the shadow of being a serial killer’s son.” —Stuart Nulman, Montreal Times (also posted on Stuart Nulman’s Grapevine)
Praise:
“The Serial Killer’s Son Takes a Wife is sharp, funny, thrilling, and endlessly original. Michael Libling gives Riley Sager a run for his money!”—Nicholas Kaufmann, bestselling author of The Hungry Earth and The Stone Serpent
“By turns hilarious and terrifying, Michael Libling’s latest novel about a young man struggling to escape his troubled past is easily one of the best small-town crime thrillers I’ve read in a very long time. Coming on the heels of the equally remarkable coming-of-age mystery Hollywood North, The Serial Killer’s Son Takes a Wife follows Bobby Blessing (né Dickens) as he struggles to escape the bloody shadow of a homicidal father. Along the way, he is dogged by a panoply of eccentric characters and unfortunate events, all rendered in Libling’s razor-sharp prose and piercing observations of small-town life that build relentlessly to a Grand Guignol finale. It’s the Coen Brothers meet Thomas Harris … and I can’t recommend it enough.”—Lawrence C. Connolly, Nightmare Cinema and Prime Stage Mystery Theatre
“Libling doesn’t just go for the jugular, he goes for your entire throat, then reaches all the way down and grabs onto your heart. Full of feeling and freakish delights, this is a wild, unpredictable story that will amaze and startle readers by turns. What if Patrick Bateman from American Psycho had been a family man? What would his son be like? Libling answers that question in this terrifying and darkly humorous tale of hereditary horror.” —Ian Rogers, author of Every House Is Haunted
“The title of Michael Libling’s novel The Serial Killer’s Son Takes a Wife confronts the reader with a reality few of us ponder: What must life be like for the family of a serial killer? Our avoidance understandable, the shame, too dark, the pain, too extreme. And the novel doesn’t shy away from the gruesome and bloody details of the violence perpetrated by the killer. What is more shocking is that Michael Libling has written one of the funniest books I have ever read. The book does a wonderful job conveying the thoughts of a young man trying to live in a world where his father murdered over two dozen people. However, the humor is what gives this narrative ballast. I laughed out loud dozens of times, sometimes with tears in my eyes. The wit in the plot, the dialogue, the insights, the similes, and the metaphors is of a comic altitude few writers can reach. What do you call a book that digs into the mind of a serial killer’s son with belly-aching laughs and rapier wit? Wonderful!” —James Ladd Thomas, author of Lester Lies Down and Ardor
“The Serial Killer’s Son Takes a Wife by Michael Libling is an experiential and heart-stopping mystery soaked in the supernatural. Libling is a Canadian treasure, and his follow up to Hollywood North is at times surprising, and at times wrenching. I loved every page of this book … it took me to an unexpected place and left me little time to catch my bearings before something else floored me with a left hook. The action and dialogue are fast-paced and kept the story moving briskly. This is deftly written, at times witty, and at times bloody terrifying. And that final revelation … !” —Timothy S. Johnston, author of The Shadow of War and the entire Oceania series
“Only a mind as demented as Michael Libling’s could conjure a book like The Serial Killer’s Son Takes a Wife. Only a writer as flat-out funny as Michael Libling could remind us that 99% of ‘slaughter’ is ‘laughter.’ And only a storyteller with the genius of Michael Libling could somehow, amidst gasps and giggles and plot twists galore, make us care.” —Paul Witcover, author of Lincolnstein and many others
“Michael Libling writes like that affable stranger on the next barstool buying you drinks as he charms you with his stories. Next thing you know, you’ve woken up in a bathtub full of ice with your kidney missing. Once you start reading this dangerous, slippery novel, watch yourself. You won’t be able to stop, as much as you will sometimes want to.” —William Shunn, author of The Accidental Terrorist
“Michael Libling is a brilliant writer. Anyone who’s read his first novel, Hollywood North, knows this already. His second, The Serial Killer’s Son Takes A Wife, is just as brilliant, giving us, as it does, the same breathtaking mix of riveting ideas and heartfelt humanity that makes all of Libling’s work so memorable.” —Bruce McAllister, author of Dream Baby and The Village Sang to the Sea
“The Serial Killer’s Son Takes A Wife is a remarkable novel … a sequence of trapdoors which plunge the reader from serial killer mystery to visionary horror … from its protagonist, the son of that serial killer, who fears family history will repeat … to his enigmatic wife, Cori … and on through the crumbling partitions of his past. Libling’s debut novel, Hollywood North, along with his short stories and novellas over the previous two decades have occupied their own undiscovered country, bordered by continents of horror and mystery. This novel, in its electric shocks and transgressive force, fulfills all the promise of that earlier work. The Serial Killer’s Son Takes A Wife raises and answers central questions of anxiety and existence. Libling, a major writer, takes chance after chance and surmounts them all.” —Barry N. Malzberg, author of The Lone Wolf crime series, Bend at the End of the Road, and many others
“Loads of fun and full of ice-cream-flavored digressions and cheeky warnings of bad things to come, The Serial Killer’s Son Takes a Wife is a raucous, deceptively dark road trip that tantalizes and twists until it’s too late to go back.” —Tanya Gough, author of Root Bound, founder of StoryBilder.com
“Michael Libling has a genius for inserting a blade … the healing surgeon, or the nurse of death?”—Clark Blaise, author of This Time, That Place
HOLLYWOOD NORTH: A Novel in Six Reels
Based, as they say, on a true events …
Jack Levin is the boy who finds things. Gus Berry is the boy who wants things. Annie Barker is the girl who believes in things. Each is an outcast in their own way. Each is obsessed with movies, TV, comic books, and unexplained phenomena. And each lives with the fear bad things are heading their way . . . Welcome to the 1960s and sleepy small-town Trenton, Ontario. Where hunting, fishing, arson, and drowning are the favored pastimes. Where dogs maim, trains derail, planes collide, and people vanish. Where secrets, lies, and selective amnesia pervade the adult agenda. Where only Gus, Jack, and Annie sense an unsettling connection to it all. And where piece by gruesome piece, this dauntless trio works to uncover the mystery at the malevolent heart of Trenton’s dark past … and darker future.
Opening lines: The lawyer didn’t need to ask me twice. Any reason to get out of Winnipeg in January was reason enough. Even if it sent me home. “It’ll be worth your while,” he said. By then, I guess, curiosity outweighed the fear, and my death instinct had kicked in.
Notables:
Named by Toronto Star reviewer Alex Good as Book of the Year 2019.
Listed among Best Books of 2019 by reviewer Stuart Nulman, Montreal Times.
Where to buy:
Originally published by ChiZine, HOLLYWOOD NORTH: A Novel in Six Reels is now available from Open Road Media pretty much everywhere, online and in brick and mortar stores, chains and independents. Signed paperbacks of ChiZine’s beautifully-designed original edition are also available directly from me via the contact form. Write! Request! And I will reply.
Backgrounder: Footnotes to a Novel
Reviews:
“Hollywood North is a breathtaking journey through Trenton, Ontario of the 1960s. The gripping story includes a wonderful mix of characters, murder, serial killers, childhood love, the supernatural, and a mystery that leaves you dying to uncover its secrets. But don’t fret, because Libling unveils all in a breathtaking finale that left my jaw on the floor. I implore you not to ignore the following advice: Stop reading and go buy this book now….” – Timothy S. Johnston, author of the Rise of Oceania series, including the newly released An Island of Light (Full review on his website.)
“Hollywood North is a terrific novel about growing up in mid-century Trenton, Ont., but it’s also a great deal more than that. Michael Libling proceeds by way of subtlety and misdirection. … Hollywood North is a coming-of-age story like no other, masterfully using the guise of supernatural horror to wrap its poison pill. Childhood idealism gives way to deceit. We give up the freedom of youth for weary resignation to the inscrutable and mostly grim workings of fate. Cold revenge is not a dish to be enjoyed but only a petty and bitter satisfaction. Childhood dreams are a source of regret and their loss a welcome oblivion. That probably sounds rather downbeat, but while Hollywood North is a dark fantasy, it’s presented in such a lively way, right down to the book’s delightful interior design elements, that you don’t notice the darkness falling until the curtain is pulled on The End. The writing has an immediacy and power of observation that tears the reader through the story like a dangerous set of rapids leading into a whirlpool of horror. The psychological and emotional business of growing up is a familiar theme in fiction, but it’s rarely been handled with this much sophistication while being so entertaining in the bargain. The balancing of pop, or even pulp, fiction with profundity is hard to maintain, but Libling makes it seem easy. As a novel containing history, real and imagined, we might even say the epic of Trenton has arrived.” – Alex Good, The Toronto Star
“Gus is a boomer kid, born in the mid-fifties, and we are going to watch him grow up in Trenton right through the pivotal years of the late sixties. This rich, yeasty, poignant depiction of an era, and of the unique small-town ambiance of Trenton, replete with dozens of memorable characters, is half of Libling’s triumph. The other half, naturally enough, resides in the gradual unrolling of the clever supernatural mystery at the roots of Trenton’s existence, and the quest that Gus and his peers—Jack Levin and Annie Barker—undertake to bring that mystery to light. …Libling’s fine first novel calls to mind a recent cousin, The Book of Hidden Things by Francesco Dimitri. Along with such media vehicles as Stranger Things, Super 8 and Stand By Me…” – Paul Di Filippo, Locus
“Three children discover that Trenton, the Canadian town where they live, hides a couple of secrets in its past. The first: at the beginning of the 20th century it was a small movie mecca, although apparently nobody wants to talk about it too much. (This is a real fact, Trenton exists and hundreds of silent movies were shot there.) The second will turn out to be quite a bit more sinister and disturbing. A delicious novel about friendship and love, childhood and adolescence, and yes, also about cinema. And, as the author grew up in Trenton, he knows what he’s talking about, and it shows….” – (translated from the original Spanish) Marcheto, Cuentos para Algernon
“Libling’s assured, quietly menacing debut, based on his World Fantasy Award–nominated novella of the same title, is steeped in bittersweet childhood nostalgia and coming-of-age foibles … Gus’s narration is chock-full of wry humor and golden-age film quotes. The leisurely telling belies the hint of evil simmering just below the town’s almost aggressively mundane surface, and there are a few surprises in store. Fans of Stand by Me and the like will find much to enjoy.” – Publishers Weekly
“Libling’s genre-defying debut seems to be a collision of descriptions: it’s a coming of age novel; it’s rooted in the little-known silent moviemaking history of Trenton, Ontario; it’s an homage to pop culture and film; etc. Classification aside, Hollywood North sounds like an atmospheric head trip. It’s about three youngsters in a small Canadian town in the 1960s, where the local pastimes are ‘hunting, fishing, arson, and drowning.’ A town like that is bound to have secrets and this one’s got plenty. Gus, Jack, and Annie are the ones who put everything together to reveal the town’s dark truth…and confront the sleepy town’s malevolent past head-on.” – John DeNardo, Kirkus Reviews
“… works as a time-machine to transport the reader back to the not-so-halcyon days of the mid-20th century … presents the coming-of-age adventures of Leo “Gloomy Gus” Berry, a disaffected kid with a fondness for movies — particularly the horror and sf flicks that played in matinee double-features in the 1960’s. His cinematic preoccupations pepper his narrative with film references that are sure to delight anyone who came of age during the cold war … It’s a chilling book with a narrative that will creep up on you and linger like a specter afterward. It’s easily one of my favorite novels of 2019.” – Lawrence C. Connolly, The 21st-Century Scop
“…Michael Libling does for Trenton, Ontario what Stephen King did for Castle Rock, Maine. As well, the book is filled with …plenty of familiar and obscure baby boomer pop culture references (which is half the fun). … It’s a gripping tale that continues the tradition of the horror writer who takes a quiet, sleepy hamlet and turns it into a place filled with secrets and terror.” – Stuart Nulman, Montreal Times
“Binge-watching a TV series is really no different than staying up into the wee hours to read just one more chapter of a compelling novel. Hollywood North certainly is that. Binge-reading is encouraged.“ – Dan Laxer, The Suburban
“Libling dives into the ominously quiet town of Trenton [Ontario] and builds up the relationships between the three leads as they slowly figure out the dark secrets lurking beneath Jack’s discovery and the town’s black history. The chemistry between trio, who love to talk movies and engage in playful disputes on the monkey bars, provides an emotional grounding to a story that only grows more sinister as it chugs along.” – Sam Reader, Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog, A Fall Harvest of New Books
Praise:
“I don’t use the word ‘brilliant’ promiscuously, never have, never will, but with Michael Libling’s wonderful first novel I use it very comfortably. For another reader, HOLLYWOOD NORTH might be simply ‘ingenious’ or ‘charming’ or ‘outrageously engaging’, but I believe it’s more than that—a novel that film buffs will love, along with anyone living in a society with the hand of popular culture upon them as baptism or drowning (or both). Yes, it’s charming and human and light-hearted in its seriousness, and clever and rich with a film-lover’s allusions, nods and hats-off; but that’s another matter. One of the best first novels I’ve read in a decade.” —Bruce McAllister, author of Dream Baby and The Village Sang to the Sea: A Memoir of Magic
“Take Stephen King, Nick Hornby, Theodore Roszak, Woody Allen, and Stranger Things, sprinkle in the spice of a subtle Canadian sensibility, and process it all through the meat grinder that is Michael Libling’s imagination, and this is the eerie result.” —Claude Lalumiere, author of Venera Dreams: A Weird Entertainment
“HOLLYWOOD NORTH, perhaps the cleverest use of the so-called unreliable narrator that I have ever seen outside of Nabokov or perhaps Evan S. Connell Jr., is also so devastating as to go far beyond the clever. Michael Libling’s first novel is the work of a prodigy with no reference to age and it explores the darkness of human complexity with bravura.” —Barry Malzberg, author of The Bend at the End of The Road, Breakfast in the Ruins, and many others
“HOLLYWOOD NORTH is an Orca of a novel, sleek and playful, short chapters and brief sentences that hit with explosive force and open up its other side, the Killer Whale, rising from the deep, throwing itself on Antarctic ice floes, crushing penguins and sea-lions and maybe a blubberfest with a walrus. This is a work of singular beauty, a paean to popular culture, to guilty pleasures, and to the mounds of trivia behind which the truth lies.” —Clark Blaise, author of Then And Now, Time Lord, The Meagre Tarmac and many others
“A simultaneously heartwarming and heartbreaking coming-of-age story set in the small town of Trenton, Ontario, against the backdrop of a little known chapter of Canada’s cinematic past. Michael Libling is to be celebrated for this gem of a book.” —Maude Barlow, author of Blue Gold, Boiling Point, and many others
“As a rabid fan of Michael Libling’s short stories, I could not wait to get my grubby mitts on a copy of HOLLYWOOD NORTH, his long-awaited first novel. I was not disappointed. Once I started, I could not put it down. … Michael Libling has a keen memory for the insights and obsessions of boys growing up oddballs in an era of widespread conformity. He writes of their triumphs, terrors, and heartbreaks with an enviable breeziness. But, like a cherry-red hot rod idling in the street at midnight, that slick surface hides a throbbing pulsebeat of dread you feel deep in your chest. When you hop aboard, you’re in for a thrilling ride, but there’s no guarantee you’ll come back in one piece. Or at all. … HOLLYWOOD NORTH is the most heartbreaking and chilling novel I’ve read in a very long time. Gus and Jack would file this find under X, for Excellent.” —William Shunn, author of The Accidental Terrorist, editor of The Piltdown Review
“In HOLLYWOOD NORTH, Michael Libling spins a tale of movies and memories, nightmares and nostalgia, with such a frightening secret at its core, that you’ll understand why, even though you can go home again, you might end up wishing you didn’t.” —Ian Rogers, author of Every House Is Haunted
“A beautifully deceptive mystery and fantasy noir novel. The book is filled with humor and heartbreak and great homages to classic films. While immersed in this Hollywood North, I felt like I was watching a mesmerizing movie unfold.” —Sheila Williams, Editor of Asimov’s Science Fiction
“Who cares about Trenton, Ontario, the early home to Canada’s film industry? Or about Jack, Anne, and Gloomy Gus? You will after you read page one of this unpredictable novel and get sucked into it like I did.” —Gordon Van Gelder, publisher Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Editor of Welcome to Dystopia: 45 Visions of What Lies Ahead
“I devoured this harrowing, disturbing, deeply moving tale of loss and redemption set against a backdrop of young love and vanished cinematic history. As with the very best movies, I walked out at the end shaken, changed, grateful.” —Paul Witcover, author of The Watchman of Eternity
Notes: Inspired by my World Fantasy Award-nominated novella, Hollywood North, that appeared in the November/December 1014 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Scroll down for more on this.
Available in print and electronic pretty much everywhere, including: Powell’s, ChaptersIndigo, Barnes & Nobel, Amazon US, Amazon Canada, Amazon UK.
For short fiction, click on Page 2…