Welcome to the third installment of my “Author of the Week”! Every Sunday, I post about a Weird Fiction and/or Lovecraftian author that I feel deserves more attention. If you have suggestions, please email me at lovecraftezine@gmail.com .

This week’s author is William Holloway.  Read his Lovecraftian books: The Immortal Body, Song of the Death God, and Lucky’s Girl.

I asked William three questions:

Please tell us about yourself — as much or as little as you’d like to say.

What can be said about William Holloway? Since I’ve begun writing he and I have become something of two separate beings. I am he and he is me, but we are not together, at least not in the good and correct sense on the term. When I write, the mundane me recedes and he comes to the fore.

I – the one that walks around and say things and pays bills and votes for this or that is a nobody. Maybe I’m just like you. Maybe not. I’ve found my own slice of the American Dream, a modern man of quiet desperations and small victories.

I have a day job, but I’m not an astronaut, or statesmen, or the great white hunter… But William Holloway…he’s a writer.

So far I’ve got three (technically four, but one is lost to time) novels written. First is the one most are familiar with. It’s called The Immortal Body, the first novel of my Lovecraftian epic, The Singularity Cycle. It’s been available for a while now on Amazon. The 2nd novel of the series is called Song of the Death God. It has not been released. My third novel is called Lucky’s Girl. It’s not part of The Singularity Cycle, but it does take place in the same universe. It’s going to be coming out on September 12th. All three novels were recently acquired by Horrific Tales Publishing out of the UK.

The Immortal Body will be re-released mid to early next year and Song of the Death God will follow about 6 months later. All three of these are Lovecraftian Cosmic Horror, but not technically mythos related.

I don’t write short stories. Not really sure why.

How and why did you begin writing?

As a compulsive reader from a very young age I never considered writing to be possibility, in fact I never even thought about it. Writers were remote titans, dreamers of dreams so big they burst forth onto the canvas page to paint themselves on the retinas of their readers.

I had big dreams as a child, but who doesn’t? Like I said, astronaut, diplomat, soldier, President of the USA, but none of that was to be. I was a terrible student, constantly in trouble. But I really wasn’t even any good at being one of the bad kids because my head was in the clouds. Being bad, being really bad, is not a vocation for a dreamer.  I wasn’t college material, but still I had big dreams, even if I had no means.

In my mid twenties I ended up in LA working on some films that will remain nameless, and washed out there too.

So I came back to Texas, and vowed, “I’ll show them!”

I began to write a treatment for a screenplay, but about seventy five pages in I discovered that this was not a treatment, this was a novel. To me this story was everything that I wanted to see up on the screen, a neo noir story of a petty criminal having visions, who sees terrible things from the corner of his eye, things that presage a wretched end to a wretched world. It was clever, it was dark, it was gritty and blah blah blah. It was called Death in Texas. A friend translated it into a screenplay, and no one was willing to finance it.

I got a real job. Years passed. I stopped reading. I stopped watching weird movies. Life happened and I found myself speaking the language of dead dreamers.

But… I found myself in a bookstore, and found an odd book called Alhazred.

It was a fictional autobiography of the Mad Arab Abdul Alhazed, author of Al Azif, the Necronomicon.

Even if I had been speaking the language of dead dreamers, I had not ceased dreaming. Even if I’d learned to ignore them, the stories still coalesced in my head.

So…I’m going to write a book!

I called one of my other old friends who knew a thing or two about writing. I just wanted moral support, but this was the guy who had turned Death in Texas into a screenplay on the basis of the strength of the story. He knew things. He knew magic words and terms like prose construction and dialogue attribution.

Sentences became paragraphs, paragraphs became chapters.

The Immortal Body was born.

What is it about Lovecraftian horror and Weird Fiction that appeals to you?

That’s a tough one. I think there was a perfect storm for me as a young man and that Lovecraft was a key ingredient. When I was very young I had night terrors. We lived in an old drafty house and my father had furniture from an old monastery in France, hand carved with Gorgons and Gargoyles. His library was a horror show of the worst of history and humanity, gray and black and white.

I was attracted to very dark music, and there was this thread through out all of it, something beyond the cartoon nemesis of Satan and his ilk, and that thread had a name; H.P. Lovecraft.

Everyone knows Eddie bursting from the grave on the cover of Live After Death and the epic and distant chorus of The Thing That Should Not Be, but it was Cacophony by Rudimentary Peni that sent me on my mission.  That album was what madness sounded like!

It was a concept album entirely devoted to H.P. Lovecraft. I had to know, and I found myself at another bookstore. I saw the famous Michael Whelan artwork, black and foreboding…

I stole it, and then I read it. I giggled, I screamed. A thing had learned to walk that ought to crawl!

What I discovered changed everything. How can you sum it up? Is it a philosophy? Is it a language? I don’t know, but I knew. And that, dear friends, is what really matters.

A big thanks to William for taking the time to answer my questions. Here are his books:

The Immortal Body:

Detective John Mitchell thought he understood murder. But that all changes when monsters are born during a faith healing at a local church.  Psychic Medium Sarah Lynn Beauchamp thought she understood the dead, but the dead have a new plan for her.  SAS veteran Dr. Menard thought the War was through with him until an unspeakable evil returns from the depths of a forgotten time.

Behind it all, a mysterious figure lurks, controlling the actors from the shadows, ushering an end to reason, sanity and the world as we know it.

Lucky’s Girl:

Something has awakened on Grove Island. Something that, even in sleep, has held Elton Township in its black embrace. Something old, wise and patient. Something that walked the ancient forests and howled beneath black skies.

Kenny McCord had a good life – his own slice of the American Dream. But all of that is over, so he is heading home to the small town he left behind so many years ago. However Kenny is not the only son that has returned to Elton Township. His childhood friend, and worst enemy, has come back to settle old scores and, quite literally, raise a little hell.

(Previous “Authors of the Week”: Richard Gavin, Molly Tanzer.)

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