About The Books
The Trained Ghost Gimmick
The Trained Ghost Gimmick starts with a bad idea that should never have worked.
Inside a historic Southern theater turned bar, a sharp-tongued lawyer launches a promotion meant to be nothing more than a joke. A free beer in exchange for a soul. Finger pricks. Blood signatures. Laughs all around. No one expects the deal to mean anything. No one expects the dead to notice.
They do.
When ghosts begin returning to the theater they were sold from, the joke becomes a problem. These ghosts are not moaning figures drifting through hallways. They are organized. They are opinionated. They care deeply about contracts. They protect the property, solve their own murders, expose corruption, and take their agreements very seriously.
What unfolds is a strange collision of ancient spirits, modern law, Southern folklore, underground poker games, and an afterlife that runs on rules, paperwork, and consequences no one bothered to read carefully.
Set against a Southern Gothic backdrop of music, haunted Americana, and forgotten histories, the story blends supernatural fiction, dark fantasy, satire, and sharp humor into something that refuses to stay in a single genre. The theater itself becomes a living force. The ghosts become enforcers. And the living quickly realize that death does not cancel a bad deal.
This is not a gentle ghost story.
It is not clean fantasy.
It is not written to play it safe.
The Trained Ghost Gimmick is dark, funny, uncomfortable, and intentionally different. A supernatural satire about power, ownership, bureaucracy, and what happens when jokes turn real and the fine print finally matters.
Read carefully.
The ghosts already have.
the lost art of bloodletting
Sure, it’s all about the blood, especially for vampires like me. I wasn’t always a vampire, mind you. I started life as a barber-surgeon skilled in the art of bloodletting. I devised an inventive way of allowing the drained blood to traverse a drainage system that led to a vat in my cellar. I despised leeches, though at times, leeches had their uses, as in cases of venous congestion when it wasn’t possible to cannulate a large vein. It wasn’t long before my drainage method began to attract a visitor to my basement. As it was my habit to reuse my large bore cannulae after a therapeutic bleed of a patient, I went downstairs to my cellar to busy myself in the cleaning of my cannulae with turpentine and water, as was the pioneering custom of the medical community 250 years ago. Interestingly enough, I was ahead of my time in paying attention to instrument cleanliness, refusing to use the same instrument from patient to patient without cleaning it, and figuring that if we washed dishes, why not surgical implements? Perhaps my cleaning habits improved my outcomes, and word circulated that I achieved better outcomes than the other barber surgeons of 1770 Savannah, Georgia. Perhaps that’s why I encountered a surprising guest after descending the stairs into my cellar to clean the tools of my trade. As it was dark before I lit the candles to create the dim light, I first heard the sound of slurping.
