Wooley, John

Ghost Band

Trumpeter Miles West only planned to tour with a dance band for a couple of years after college. Now middle-aged, he finds himself still riding a bus across the country with a group that plays under the name of a long-dead bandleader--in musical parlance, a Ghost Band. Playing music that revives long-forgotten memories and rekindles romances, the band is never far from the specters of the past. In a breathtaking moment during a special song for sweethearts, Miles is shocked to discover the link to the past is far more real than anyone ever dared to imagine... In Dark Within Wooley gave us a new way to view technology. His Awash in the Blood shed a new light on vampirism. Now, he has expertly conjured a fresh vision of the spirit world. Ghost Band is a rich, haunting exploration of murder, mystery, and music that will resonate with readers long after the last page is turned.

Forgotten Horrors 4: Dreams That Money Can Buy

By laying down a dime or 15 cents at the box office, a gawky, socially awkward kid could live for a few hours in a dream world of jitterbugs and bobbysoxers, running right alongside Poverty Row stars bravely entering forbidding haunted houses and creepy cemeteries. And that is what most of the pictures in this volume are: little dreams, made all the more dreamlike by their obscurity. The pictures are not big-studio productions full of high-wattage star power, but quirky titles from little studios. Forgotten Horrors 4 remains focused on the tawdry (but no less magical) Hollywood backstreet known as Poverty Row. From their Poverty Row vantage, actors gazed out at the Golden City just beyond their grasp and, between shots on cheap sets in quickie productions for directors far beneath the station of DeMille, imagined life as Gregory Peck or Loretta Young. Seen today, these small-studio pictures carry a quirky, almost heartwarming nobility. They know what they are, and the people involved allowing for factors ranging from disillusionment to cynicism to John Barleycorn seem to be doing the best they can. They know it s not MGM or Paramount. But anyway, they are working. Without the bankable stars that all America knew, the people who made these films had to have Something Else going for them. And that Something Else was almost always an exploitable angle, something the theater owners could sell in lieu of marquee names. In the pictures examined between these covers, that Something Else was a horrific or bizarre element of one sort or another, ranging from simple murder to terrors far more fiendish. In the Westerns and the comedies, the horror element often came as a lagniappe, giving an extra thrill to the folks who probably would have shown up anyway. And rather than fading into obscurity, these little gems still manage to entertain us almost 60 years after their debuts.

Death's Door

Police officer Case Hamilton is brought back from clinical death by strange and unauthorized medical techniques. But something has come back with him; Case is not the man he once was. Death has taken a piece of him...and it wants more.

Dark Within

Readers and critics alike applauded John Wooley's first forays into the shadowy world of horror with co-writer Ron Wolfe Death's Door and Old Fears. Now, with his first solo novel, this horror master has written his most spine-tingling tale yet.

What if a high-tech stranger in a glittering metallic box showed up outside your door and offered you anything you wanted? Could you resist? Would you want to? And what if you found out too late that the fulfillment of your dreams came with a terrifying price--an inescapable one-way trip not only through the eternal torment of that box, but also through the dark recesses of your own soul?

That's the temptation confronting Jim and Deborah Douglas and their small-town Oklahoma friends when the dark stranger appears on their property. Before Jim and the others can fully understand what--or who--they're dealing with, they're trapped, one after the other, by a power that can probe their hidden secrets--their darkest fears and ugliest desires--and bring them to a screaming reality. It will take all the strength, all the courage--and all the faith--Jim can muster to save his friends and family. Because the only way to set himself and the others free is to confront the dark within. Within the box--and himself.

Forgotten Horrors: v. 4 (Forgotten Horrors)

Old Fears

In this groundbreaking novel, which has been called "a modern masterpiece" and "the quintessential horror story," Mick Winters comes home after twenty years to find his worst childhood fears waiting for him--as deadly realities.

Awash in the Blood

Televangelist Mo Johnston is doing all right for himself, but on All Souls's Night, while vacationing in Eastern Europe, he is attacked by a vampire. His ministry acquires new power and vitality--as does Johnston himself. He finds himself spinning into an abyss of evil, even as he fights against his own transformation. Miraculously, his bite brings eternal life. And that'ss just what his God-fearing disciples crave. Isn't it?

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