Next up in our line up of author profiles from Dead of Winter is Robert Perret, author of the irreverent supernatural thriller “Coyoteman”. His story follows a serial killer who has the tables turned on him in the most fantastic way.
Read on to find out what got Robert started as a writer and then get an excerpt from “Coyoteman”.
How did you get started with writing?
When I was a kid I used to buy comic books off of a spinner rack at the grocery store with my allowance. Marvel, in particular, did a really good job of creating a sense of community with their letter pages and the proclamations from Stan Lee. So I decided early on that I would be the next Stan Lee and spent my formative years up though college working towards writing comic books. If you look at my bio you will see my youthful dreams were dashed upon the rocks of reality, but I have been a “writer” as long as I can remember, at least in spirit.
Do you tend to write in just one genre or do you like to write across multiple genres?
I have had the most success writing Sherlockian pastiches, maybe because I love Sherlock Holmes more than anything except my family. I have tried my hand at various pulp genres, and I feel like I have done best with crime and horror. My lifetime goal is to write a good post-modern Sherlockian noir, but I haven’t quite gotten there yet.
What made you decide to write “Coyoteman”? Is there a particular backstory to it?
I like the slasher genre of the seventies and eighties and there haven’t been a lot of good stories in that vein recently, so to an extent I was writing the story I would like to read. Also, I think the Inland Northwest is woefully underused as a setting. It’s all jagged peaks and abandoned mines and dark forests and vast windswept plains of nothingness and generally super gothic and creepy and yet it rarely gets used as a setting.
What do you like to do when you’re not writing?
Spending time with my young children is my only other “hobby.”
Where is the best place for readers to find out more about your work?
Thanks, Robert! And now for an excerpt you have to read to believe from “Coyoteman”.
Coyoteman
Robert Perret
I was killed on the evening of August 23rd, 1981 by two transient tweakers by the names of Randy Mitchell and Lurlene Simons.
That was a first. I’d made a little hobby of cruising the I-12 back and forth across the state line, through the Bitterroots. Find me some latter-day hippies, drifters or hobos, hitchin’. Seeing that outstretched thumb, the international sign of the parasite, it always put me in a hunting mood. I’d drive them out on some back road. A shortcut I’d tell them, or a scenic route if they didn’t seem to be in a hurry to get anywhere. I’d kick them out of the car, give them a 20-minute head start.
The trunk of my reliable old Plymouth Duster could hold four adult bodies in a pinch, so my own corpse was spread out in relative luxury on its lonesome. It was some sort of purgatory, I supposed, to be here in my own trunk listening to these two dipshits having their little Bonnie and Clyde adventure. They’d knocked over a drugstore in Lolo. Some geriatric pharmacist handing everything over at the first sight of a pistol, no doubt, but to hear them tell it, these two were real banditos.
And I did. I had no choice, tethered to a dead body like I was. I’d first seen Lurlene off the side of the road. Long brown leg propped up on the guard rail, jean shorts cut off to Hallelujah, flannel shirt knotted up between her tits so her bellybutton seemed lost in a sea of taut skin. She arched her back when she stuck her thumb out, fanning herself with a straw cowboy hat in the other. She was a living pin-up meant to get some trucker or farmhand all hot and bothered. Me, I just saw a hundred greasy, hairy schlubs grabbing her, grinding up against her in my mind. It sickened me.
When I pulled over she leaned into the passenger window, all sweat and perfume and cleavage, while Randy came creeping up out of the ditch beside the road. It was a standard ploy, gas, grass, or ass as the bumper sticker says. Guess which gets picked up the quickest. I pretend to be chagrined and they pretend to be apologetic and away we go.
[…]
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