Mark Justice
It probably started with the Lone Ranger.,When I was a kid, westerns were everywhere, especially at our house. My dad was a nut for them. The table next to his chair always had a Louis Lâ€™Amour book on it. A John Wayne movie on a Saturday afternoon took precedence over everything else, even baseball games. Half the TV schedule was comprised of shoot-â€˜em-ups, including reruns of the Clayton Moore â€œLone Rangerâ€ series.,Believe me, I grew up well versed in â€œGiddyupâ€ and â€œWhoa!â€ and â€œReach fer the sky, mister!â€,At some point, though, Iâ€™d had enough. I developed interests of my own, and the stuff my parents liked couldnâ€™t be my favorites anymore. It just wasnâ€™t cool.,Among my growing passions were â€œChiller Theater,â€ â€œFamous Monsters of Filmland,â€ Marvel Comics and pulp magazine reprints of â€œDoc Savageâ€ and â€œThe Spider.â€,Years later, I came across a DVD of â€œLone Rangerâ€ episodes. Giving in to a twinge of nostalgia, I bought it. It wasnâ€™t great, but it was a classic part of my childhood. More importantly, it started the wheels rolling toward â€œWhat if?â€,A lot of writers will tell you that almost everything springs from â€œWhat if?â€ My moment came right after the Lone Ranger and his stoic sidekick, Tonto, had stopped the bad guys, thus earning the undying gratitude of the whole town. As the crime-fighting duo saddled up and rode off toward their next adventure, I thought, â€œWhat if everybody thinks the Lone Ranger is in charge, but heâ€™s really just some guy hired by Tonto to be the face of their crime-fighting operation and later, after the Ranger is snoring in his bedroll, Tonto creeps back to town to collect the reward money that the Ranger always turns down?â€ Hey, a guy has to plan for his future. Maybe Tonto needs a down payment on that retirement condo in Boca.,	,Something else writers will tell you is that the What If moment occurs maybe ten or twenty times a day. Out of those, maybeâ€“maybeâ€“one idea a week will become the germ for a story or novel or screenplay or poem.,The Tonto-as-boss notion was one of those that seemed to offer nothing more than a momentâ€™s amusement. â€œNothing to see here,â€ it seemed to say, â€œso move along.â€ I did.,But every now and then, the notion would resurface and Iâ€™d examine it and toss it back to wherever the lonely, unused concepts reside. It was incompleteâ€”one half of an equation. One day, during a marathon of bad horror flicks, the other piece of the concept fell into place. ,â€œThe faithful Indian sidekick has a magic talisman that he stole. He only understands it enough to do one magical thing: to reanimate a corpse and control it like a puppet. While the rest of the west believes The Dead Sheriff is a murdered lawman that dug his way out of his grave to bring to justice the killers of his family, the truth is much different. The undead avenger is simply a means for a young man with a mystical totem to earn a little cash. Unfortunately, where magic and money are concerned, things inevitably go wrong.â€,Despite a tendency for bits of himself to fall off along the dusty trail, I plan for The Dead Sheriff to be righting wrongs for many years to come, and encountering the oddest characters to ever saddle up, like the crazed cannibal brothers, a traveling vampire bordello and the posse made up of the Westâ€™s far less successful masked vigilantes. Did I mention the magic talismanâ€™s original owner and his demonic sidekick? Or the time traveler?,I hope youâ€™ll stroll into the saloon, belly up to the bar and order of a shot of pulpy fun. The Wild West is about to get very weird. ,Mark Justice,In the hills of Kentucky
Horror
The Dead Sheriff: Zombie Damnation (Book #1)