But even though he had a two-book deal with Warner, it was not to be. Martindale’s next book was Where the Chill Waits (1991), about four businessmen on an Ontario hunting expedition attacked by the Wendigo, then his agent secured him a contract to write two novels for Pocket Books under a pen name, but the horror boom had started dying even before before Where the Chill Waits came out, and Warner abandoned the book, stranding it on bookstore shelves with zero support. On the plus side, it allowed Martindale to publish his Pocket books under his own name. On the negative side, Pocket saddled his two books with terrible covers and threw them out on the marketplace with little distribution. Demon Dance, a horror Western, came out in 1991, and The Voice in the Basement came out in 1993.

Garon, who had sold The Firm for John Grisham, encouraged Martindale to write legal thrillers, which were all the rage at the time. “I dabbled a little with other stuff, but I was mostly interested in writing horror,” Martindale says. “Writing the last two books, knowing they put a shitty cover on the third, and knowing they would do the same with the fourth, holding a day job and writing at night, it was hard. I’d just as soon not put up with that. So I just stopped writing. I dabbled in screenwriting but that was it for novels.”

Martindale never wrote a book again.

And so Chris Stiles never made it to that Florida diner, never found out what disgusting monster killed his brother, never settled down with Billie, the waitress, never made sweet love to a sexy shapeshifting monster. Instead, he exists in a frozen state of eternal potential, striding out of the end of Nightblood into an early-­Nineties American landscape of nu metal and the Macarena, katana strapped to his back, overcoat billowing around him, ghost brother on his shoulder, always ready for more adventures. Real men don’t need closure. Just new adventures on the horizon. And that’s where new adventures will always exist for Chris Stiles, Ghost Breaker.

Grady Hendrix

September 2019

Grady Hendrix is a novelist and screenwriter whose books include Horrorstör, My Best Friend’s Exorcism, and We Sold Our Souls. His history of the paperback horror boom of the Seventies and Eighties, Paperbacks from Hell, won the Stoker Award. You can stalk him at www.gradyhendrix.com.

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgment

Thanks to my brothers Ted and Kevin for their suggestions; to Ron, for technical advice and a talent for mayhem; to Rick, for the editing lessons; and most of all, to Mom, whose sharp ear and unending patience are a writer’s best friend.

Prologue

Introduction

Stiles lay flat on his back in bed with his eyes shut. And he listened.