The Second Coming

Today I am joined by the delightful Griffin Hayes. Hi Griffin, please tell the captive audience a little bit about yourself.

Griffin Hayes spent most of his adolescence either watching grainy reruns of The Twilight Zone or rereading worn-out copies of Raymond Chandler novels. His taste for the unsettling and the inexplicable eventually found outlet in his short stories; four of which have been published to date: The Grip, The Second Coming, Bird Of Prey, and Last Call. His first novel, Malice along with his other work is currently available on Amazon. When not talking about himself in the third person, Hayes can usually be found in front of a keyboard, working furiously to finish his next novel.

Yes, that third person affliction can be useful at times, but more often than not, it can be unsettling. Tell us about your writing process?

I’m not sure I’d call it a process so much as a flailing session. I throw around a lot of ideas and a ton of failed sentences and hopefully the strongest survives.

That’s actually a very apt description of the process. Is there a genre, other than the one you currently write in, that you wish you could break into?

Believe it or not romance. That would be a challenge for me and I’m always looking to push myself.

Romance you say? That’s fascinating! What are the 5 books that have influenced you the most, and why?

I try and take something away from every book I read, good and bad. The books that had the greatest stylistic impact on me were the Quiller series by Adam Hall. He wrote James Bond style thrillers set during the cold war and liked to write probably the longest sentences in any novel I’ve ever read.

If you could cast one of your works, who would you choose to play your main characters?

When I wrote my supernatural thriller Malice, I wanted Seth Green to play Lysander and Christina Ricci to play Samantha. Although, I’d just be happy if someone wanted to turn my books into movies.

I can certainly appreciate that! What is the first thing you would do if you woke up one morning to find one of your books on the NY Times Bestsellers List?

Hit the roof and then get a panic attack. I mean, what goes up must come down right? I might have OCD, I’m looking into it.

I don’t think I’ve met an author yet that doesn’t have some form of OCD… It’s like a badge of honour we happily wear and promptly forget about. Until that moment it rears it’s compulsive head. So tell us Griffin, do you have any vices that you turn to while you are writing?

Sadly, no. I’m pretty focused when I write. But once I’m done, now that’s a different story.

Focus is good. Besides there is no law that states you need a vice to write. What do you do when you’re not writing?

Edit and/or dream up the next scene.

Please share with us the first nine lines of your current work-in-progress.

I’ve got a few and the beginnings always change, but I will give you the first nine from my most recent novel, Dark Passage.

The boy sat on a plastic covered couch, watching a plastic covered TV, in a plastic covered house. He was a smart boy. Smart enough to know the show he was watching was called Looney Tunes and perhaps even smarter still because he knew that Bugs Bunny was about to get the better of that dim-witted Elmer Fudd again. Elmer had made the silly mistake of taking a nap in the woods and a big billowing dream cloud was floating serenely above his head. Bugs saw the cloud and crawled into it with a giant can of paint in his hand.

Nightmare paint.

He was going to turn the pudgy hunter’s nice dreams into awful ugly dreams filled with monsters with claws and long pointed teeth. Of course none of this had happened yet. Although he knew it would since he’d seen this episode three times already.

The boy shifted, and the plastic covered couch let out a groan, one that sounded an awful lot like the groan in his tummy.

Awesome! Dark Passage is on my reading list so I will eventually get there! For those of you that haven’t heard anything about it yet, here’s the cover and synopsis (clicking on the cover will take you directly to Amazon):

Tyson Barrett dreams of having his old life back. The way things used to be before the torturous nightmares, before the insomnia, before his wife left with their young son, before his business began teetering on the verge of collapse.

Feeling like a man on the edge of a cliff with nothing to lose, he joins an underground trial for a new wonder drug called Noxil.

But this cure carries a terrible, nerve-shattering price. One that will force him to confront the dark past he’s spent a lifetime trying to forget.

The evil chasing him has never been far away and soon he will learn why some dreams were never meant to come true.

(Note: Dark Passage is currently selling for 99¢, so get your butts to Amazon and buy it now!! While you’re there, make sure you check out the rest of his work! Heck, I even reviewed his short story The Second Coming on this blog a while back. Interested in reading it? Check it out here.)

I would like to thank Griffin for taking time out of his busy schedule to answer my questions. If you’d like to connect with Griffin, you can find him at his blog, on Twitter, or email him directly at: griffinhayesbooks@gmail.com.

Join me next week when I will be joined by Anderson O’Donnell who is touring to support his new book Kingdom.

“Just enough for a drop or two at a time, no more. And how you were tied just right so that the water would hit your forehead dead center each and every time. Of course, as Knuckles told it, the first two hundred drops never did much more than annoy the hell out of you. At about the first thousand, the skin on your forehead would start to redden. And by twenty thousand, when you head was beginning to bear more than a passing resemblance to a soggy watermelon, you were telling those sick bastards anything they wanted to hear.”

The Second Coming: A Horror Short Story by Griffin Hayes is a story with an interesting premise. To explain what I mean, here is the synopsis from Amazon –

Jack Barrow has traveled back in time to save his family from a sadistic killer. All he has to do is convince Dr. Sims at Bellevue Heights Mental Institution that he isn’t crazy.

As you’re reading, you get the sense that something is not quite what it seems as first blush. As Hayes draws you in, you find yourself wondering what it would be like to be accused of a crime you know you didn’t commit. As you read, your perception changes once met with the proof that what you believe isn’t as simple as you have perceived it.

The interplay between Jack Burrows and Dr. Simms is at time tense and others oddly soothing. As the story unfolds around you, the feeling that you are a witness behind the glass is undeniable. Hayes writes with such reality that you cannot ignore the emotion he builds with his words. Even though The Second Coming: A Horror Short Story is only considered a short, it excited me to read what else Griffin Hayes has to offer.

4.5 stars out of 5!