WTW Wednesay, Lyn Croft and Brian Bowyer

Writer to Writer Wednesday featuring Brian Bowyer

Interviewed by Lyn Croft

Lyn: Today I have the wonderfully talented Brian Bowyer. Hello Brian! Thanks so much for taking the time to sit down and chat with me. I’m so excited to see what you have for us today!

Brian: Hello, Lyn! Thank you for taking the time to interview me.

Lyn:  Can you tell me a little about yourself? Hobbies, passions, what inspired you to become a writer?

Brian: I’ve lived all over the East Coast. I’ve worked as a musician, a banker, a bartender, a bouncer, and a bomb maker for a coal-testing laboratory. I love playing guitar and writing music. I also enjoy reading and working out. But my greatest passion is and always has been writing stories. Reading the works of my favorite authors is what inspired me to become a writer. Imitation preceded creation, however. It took a few years to finally find my voice.

Lyn: Can you tell us about any books you currently have out?

Brian: I currently have three books available: NOCTURNAL BLOOD, a vampire novel; SHELF LIFE, a thriller; and GRAVEYARD BLUES, a crime story.

Lyn: Are there any characters that you relate to, and why?

Brian: All of them, I suppose, although some more than others. The twins, Sirius and Olivia, in NOCTURNAL BLOOD, because—like them—I was a musician at a young age. Chad in GRAVEYARD BLUES is pretty much exactly how I was as a teenager, living in hotels and never staying in one place. Eric in SHELF LIFE, because I was going through a lot of the same things he does as a father while I was writing it, except for the fact that my child didn’t have a terminal disease.

Lyn: What are your favorite genres? Do you write in different genres, or stick to one in particular?

Brian: I read and write in several genres, but my favorite is definitely horror. It was my first love. What can I say? I’ve always harbored an affinity for darkness, the night, and the secrets the night contains.

Lyn:  What better describes you? Do you spend time writing everyday, or are you the spontaneous writer who will wake up in the middle of the night and go for it!

Brian: I’m nocturnal. I rarely go to sleep until sometime after dawn. I’ve always done most of my writing at night.

Lyn:  What do you have coming up for us? Anything new and exciting?

Brian: I’m currently working on two books: a novel called ROAD NARROWS and a collection of short fiction called MATTERS OF SHADE. Both are new and both—to me—are exciting.

Lyn:  Awesome! I can’t wait to see more. Name one person that you feel supported you outside of family members.

Brian: Just one? Regina Mitchell, editor extraordinaire.

Lyn:  Do you have any advice for new authors out there?

Brian: Read a lot and write a lot. There’s no other way to become a better writer. Write at least three drafts of everything. When you think your manuscript is perfect, hire an editor.

Lyn:  Thank you so much for sitting with me. It was wonderful to get to know you better! Anything else you would like to share with your readers that I didn’t ask?

Brian: Thanks for interviewing me. And I would like to thank the readers for their time. If you wish to contact me, drop me a line at brianbowyer@suddenlink.net.

Lyn: Awesome! Thanks again for sharing with us. How about leaving us with a little tidbit of Nocturnal Blood to tantalize our taste buds.

Helen checked the prices of video games momentarily, then turned around. Nicholas wasn’t beside her. She didn’t panic. He had probably wandered off, looking at toys. But when she didn’t see him in the next aisle over, or the next one or the next, nor, indeed, anywhere in the toy section, a dread the likes of which she’d never experienced seized her fully.

He wouldn’t have wandered out of the toy section. No other items in the store would have interested him.  The word abduction came to mind, but she told herself to not even entertain that theory, that if she refused to consider that horrible possibility, it wouldn’t be true.

No one could have stolen Nicholas from her, could they?

No.  That was absurd.   Sure, it was becoming a sort of national epidemic in the media, with new children being kidnapped seemingly every day.   But not her child, surely.

Dear God, not her precious Nicholas….

She went in search of her son, running around the store, calling his name. She didn’t find him.
  One of the managers got his description and began paging through the intercom for Nicholas or anyone who may have seen him to please come to the service station.  Helen and some of the employees and a few customers looked throughout the store. They checked the restrooms, dressing rooms, all departments, beneath counters, the concession area up front amidst the video games and vending machines, even the layaway bins in back, which were filling quickly with Christmas only a couple of months away.

Helen was paged to report to the service station.

Please God, she thought, let him be standing there, smiling, wondering what the fuss was about.
  But he wasn’t there.  There was only a manager and two employees in uniform, a teenaged boy and girl. They weren’t smiling.

“What is it?” Helen said. “Why did you page me?”

“These associates,” the manager said, “work in the warehouse. They saw a boy that fits your child’s description leave the building with a man through the shipping and receiving doors.”

“A man?” Helen said. “What did he look like?”

“Italian,” the girl said. “About fifty, maybe. Average height and weight, with black hair turning gray.”

Helen said, “It may not have been Nicholas. What was the boy wearing?”

“Blue jeans and a Bulls jersey,” the male associate said. “The number on the jersey was thirty-three.”

That matched his outfit. But had he been wearing number thirty-three or twenty-three? She couldn’t remember.

Helen rushed to the back of the store, then outside through the shipping and receiving doors.
  She saw something small and green on the parking lot by a Dumpster. She approached it and saw that it was Nicholas’s little bead-stuffed cloth lizard that she’d bought him two years ago at the carnival when he’d been four.

He loved it so much that he carried it everywhere he went. She bent over, picked it up, and smelled it. Tears came then. She lost the strength to stand. She sat down on the pavement. She closed her eyes and prayed.

A man’s voice interrupted her supplication.  She opened her eyes and looked up.
  A police officer and the manager were standing beside her. The policeman said, “We need you to go home, right away, in case he escapes and makes it to a telephone.”

“Yes,” Helen said, grasping on to any hope remaining. “He may break free and try to call me.”
  She had never driven as fast in her life as she drove back to her apartment.   She paced the floors, and wept hysterically, and drank cups of coffee one after another to ensure she would stay awake, even though she knew that to sleep would be impossible.

Darkness claimed the city around eight-thirty. Her phone rang at ten minutes after nine. She lifted the receiver on the first ring. “Nicholas?”

“No. It’s me.” Barb, her best friend at the diner. “Helen, I’m so sorry. I saw the story on the news—”

“I can’t talk right now,” Helen said. “In case he calls.”

She hung the phone up, turned the TV on, and tuned to CNN. She read the headline Six-year-old Nicholas Twain Abducted From Mall In Chicago on the leftward-moving ticker at the bottom of the screen. She walked into the kitchen. Her hands shook so badly she had trouble splashing a shot of bourbon into her coffee. She returned to the living room. The network was airing the full story. A picture of Nicholas (the one she’d given the policeman before speeding home) was on the screen. The sight of him smiling, on television, under these circumstances, made her cry so hard she started hyperventilating.

 The phone rang. She caught her breath in a fit of maternal instinct and lifted the receiver. “Nicholas?”

It wasn’t Nicholas. It was Carrie, another of her waitress friends. Helen quickly explained that she couldn’t talk, and hung up the phone.  This went on until almost midnight, as more and more people called as soon as they heard the news. Nicholas’s teacher; her boss and more friends from the diner; mothers of her son’s first-grade classmates; Gaston, in Los Angeles, saying he’d be on the next flight to Chicago.

But Nicholas never called. Helen prayed to God for deliverance of her son. She needed him in her arms, unharmed and alive.  An artist’s composite sketch of the kidnapper—based on the descriptions provided by the two witnesses—was displayed on the TV screen. Helen screamed at the drawing and begged it to release Nicholas as if the picture could somehow hear her. She was still crying and sipping whiskey-spiked coffee when dawn transformed the longest night of her life into morning.

Her phone rang at noon.  It wasn’t Nicholas.  It was someone informing her that a young boy’s corpse had been discovered in a motel room. Could she come to the morgue and view the body?
  She told the man that she was in no condition to drive. He told her that someone would arrive for her soon.

“Wait,” Helen said, before he hung up. “You’ve seen the body, right?”

“Yes.”

“And you’ve seen the picture of my son?”

“Yes.”

“So then just tell me. Is it Nicholas, or isn’t it?”

“Well, ma’am, to be perfectly honest … we can’t tell one way or the other.”

A patrolman knocked on her door. While en route to the morgue, he said, “I’m sorry about your loss. I’m a father myself. I sure hope this turns out not to be your son.”

At the morgue, the officer and an attendant led Helen to where the child’s corpse was stored.
  When the steel slab was pulled out of its cold holding cell, Helen was revolted by the body’s condition, but relieved to see that this couldn’t possibly be her Nicholas. She was a good woman and mother, and Nicholas was such a bright and loving child that God was far, far too merciful (wasn’t He?) to allow her son to be so thoroughly tortured and defiled.

This corpse was faceless. The facial skin had been torn away. There was only muscle and gristle that was shockingly red over the whiteness of bone. There were two gaping holes where the nose should’ve been, and the eyes, ears, and lips, too, had been removed. The empty eye sockets seemed abnormally large. Only broken pieces of teeth remained in the mouth. The tongue was gone. The head had been scalped to the skull.

On closer inspection, she saw that the head wasn’t connected to the neck. It had simply been placed where it had been prior to decapitation. The horrors got worse.

The arms had been put back together from hands to wrists to elbows to shoulders: the fingers from tips to middle joints to knuckles. Ten toes had been placed in correct order at the ends of both feet, which had been hacked off at the ankles. The legs were severed at shins, knees, and thighs. There were stitches up the abdomen, as if the child had been eviscerated and then—later—sewn up by a professional.

A couple of body parts were still missing. It was a once-living jigsaw puzzle of human flesh and bone, covered in jagged black holes that could only be cigarette burns.

Helen vomited a liquid confection of coffee, bourbon, and bile all over the floor. “I’m sorry,” she said. “That’s just … I mean … the cruelest thing … I’ve ever seen.”

“Nonsense,” the officer said. “I puked myself an hour ago. And I hate it that you have to see this. But the team here did the best they could, and we still couldn’t ID this poor, poor little boy.”

“That’s not Nicholas,” Helen said.

“Are you positive?”

“Yes. That’s not my son. It can’t be.”

“So there’s nothing here whatsoever that you recognize?”

She pulled hair out of her face. “No.” And then, almost as an afterthought, she added, “I know it isn’t him. But, just to be sure, roll over the left lower leg.”

  The attendant, with gloved hands, clutched a section between ankle and knee. “This part?” 

“Yes.” 

He did.
  Helen saw the light brown birthmark shaped like a crescent moon on Nicholas’s left calf, and passed out.

*

She came to in a hospital room. Consciousness brought with it no reprieve from this nightmare.
  Her son was gone. He had suffered unspeakable atrocities before his crossing. Helen thought little of a god that would allow it.  She emerged from the raised bed. She got dressed. She took the elevator down to the first floor.  She didn’t bother checking out of the hospital.

 Outside, the blue sky was cloudless. Wind whipped her hair in every direction.
 She couldn’t abandon Nicholas’s lizard to starvation.  Helen approached the street and hailed a cab to her apartment. She paid her fare, tipped the driver, then headed straight for Nicholas’s bedroom.
 Mercer was perched on a branch within his cage, motionless but for those roving eyeballs.
 She retrieved the iguana by his underbelly. She barely felt the pricks when his claws scratched her forearms and wrists.

Outside, she released Mercer in some grass at the parking lot’s perimeter. The iguana stalked toward the certain death that waited in downtown Chicago. Helen walked west, toward the sun, to the nearest filling station down the street. Two pumps in front were available, but she didn’t want anyone trying to save her.  She went behind the store. The diesel pumps, thankfully, were deserted.

“Nicholas, I’m on my way, baby. Wait for me, okay? Mommy’s coming. I’ll see you soon.”

She grabbed the first nozzle she happened upon, aimed it at her face like a pistol, pressed the button that activated the pump, and began hosing herself thoroughly with diesel fuel. She soaked her hair and face with her eyes closed, then opened her eyes and drenched her blouse, arms and hands, her jeans and sneakers and even the pavement around her in a petroleum rain.  Helen retrieved a lighter from her pocket and ignited herself.  Flames engulfed her immediately.  She curled up like a fetus on the asphalt and screamed.

Her last coherent thought before darkness claimed her was that fire, indeed, is the purest form of cleansing.

You can find out more about Brian, and his books at:

Amazon author page: http://www.amazon.com/Brian-Bowyer/e/B005O52URM/ref=ntt_dp_epwbk_0

Facebook author page:  http://www.facebook.com/pages/Brian-Bowyer-Author/237415783011375