by Cesare, Adam
Next Summer
Allison’s fingers glided over the keyboard. There had not been a computer in David’s airstream, so she had not touched computer keys in what felt like forever.
Her fingers still bore the scars from when she’d made her ceremonial crown and garland, even though the wounds were long healed.
She looked up at the message she’d typed into the text entry window.
Recently under new management, The Second Chance Hotel is on the lookout for a dedicated, hard-working and friendly guest liaison to join our staff for the summer. Experience is encouraged but not required. Serious inquiries only.
There were times like these, when she was reminded of an aspect of her life before, that she would get a touch of sadness. A brief, deep loneliness when she thought about Claire. Then she remembered how the others had shot her down like that, only to laugh about it later.
But then she remembered all she had now, how lucky she was to be growing up and growing into a community, and all the parts of her old life that she did not need any longer.
She stood up from her seat, stretched and hit the Post button.
Out in the lobby, she could hear Sissy helping a guest to check-in. As Allison left the office, the girl briefly paused in helping to customer to greet her.
“Good morning, Ms. Pomero. How are you today?”
She felt great.
Acknowledgments (2014)
After I finished this book, I stood over my better half’s shoulder and watched her as she read the entire thing. It was three in the morning by the time we were finished. I love you, Jen.
My other pre-reader, Josh, did some heavy lifting, too.
Huge thanks to these people who have read my work and said nice things about it publicly. This includes Brandon St. Pierre, Jennifer Francis, Jesse Lawrence, Anita Eva, Tod Clark, Mike Antonio, Andrew Kasch and anyone else who was kind enough to take the time and review or tell a friend about Tribesmen or Video Night.
I’m in the blessed position to know some tremendously talented writers who’ve influenced both my work and career. Eternal thanks to Stephen Graham Jones, John Skipp, Matt Serafini, Ed Kurtz, Lynne Hansen, Jeff Strand, Gabino Iglesias, Cameron Pierce, J. David Osborne, Shane McKenzie, Bracken MacLeod, David Bernstein, Alan Spencer, Aaron Dries, Nate Kenyon and last (but not least) my friends and vocal supporters John Boden, Mercedes Yardley, Ken & Sarah Wood and the rest of the Shock Totem crew.
Big ups to Sam McCanna for turning my books into gorgeous T-shirts for his company Skurvy Ink (skurvyink.com) and Justin Coons and Nick Gucker for their art.
Final thanks to Don D’Auria, who’s not only my editor, but a fount of 1960s and ’70s Euro-horror knowledge and quality conversation.
Apologies to anyone I didn’t mention above, not the least of which seems to be my mother and father, the people I owe the most. I love you.
Author’s Afterword
I don’t have kids, but I’ve been told that it’s not cool to favor one kid over the others.
I don’t have kids, but I do have a backlist of novels. But since it would be grossly inappropriate to compare novels to children, I feel like I’m on firm moral ground when I declare that The Summer Job is my favorite novel on that backlist.
Between school and work I spent a little over seven years living in the city of Boston, and even while most of the book takes place in the fictional(?) Mission, MA: this is a book that serves to remind me of a place I love.
Though I was born a New Yorker and am currently a proud Philadelphian, there is something about New England.
I mean, we have Dunkin Donuts here in Philly, but I rarely visit them, preferring to keep Dunks a treat for Boston visits. Like the smell of dead leaves in the Commons, or the taste of the fish and chips at my favorite Irish pub: it’s one more piece of sense memory that I want to remain special.
And speaking of Boston visits: I still get up to town once a year. I do it on business, vending my books at the Rock and Shock convention in Worcester (Woostahhh), MA. When I call that business, it’s more of a mix of business and pleasure, because I’ve been going to Rock and Shock long before I was published, would gladly travel to it if I didn’t sell a single book at the con.
But I do sell books there and The Summer Job is usually the one I try to sell the hardest to people who come up to the table and seem hesitant to pick up a “har-u-rah” book.
It’s mellower than my other stuff, it’s more feminine, it’s more (I think) literary. At least, that’s what I’d thought it was before going back over it to prepare this new edition. But there’s also a fierceness that I didn’t remember it having. There are also a few characters who I must have blocked from my memory, they were just too unpleasant. And those aren’t bad things: if anything I’m surprised that I can be surprised by something I wrote.
Don’t worry: I’m going to end this extended pat on the back very soon, but before I do I have a few pieces of housekeeping (or “guest liaisoning” if we can borrow a term):
Those acknowledgements preceding this afterword are from the first paperback edition, since then the book has been released as a beautiful limited edition from Sinister Grin Press, who I must thank (Tristan Thorne, Matt Worthington, Frank Walls) and with a cover by the supremely talented Sasha Yosselani, who I must also thank. This new mass market edition sports a cover by Fredrick Richardson. Who did a spectacular job, I think. Justin Coons designed a T-shirt and then was cool enough to print me out a gorgeous poster of the same design in color.
Thank you so much for taking the time to read The Summer Job. If you liked it, I sincerely hope you consider leaving a review (both Amazon and Goodreads help immensely) and check out some of my other work.
If you didn’t like it: I still hope you leave that review and check out some of my other work (it’s TOTES different, I promise).
Until next time. I’ll see you in the New England of my dreams.
Warmest wishes,
Adam Cesare
1/26/2017
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Also Available
The Con Season
Horror movie starlet Clarissa Lee is beautiful, internationally known, and…completely broke.
To cap off years of questionable financial and personal decisions, Clarissa accepts an invitation to participate in a “fully immersive” fan convention. She arrives at an off-season summer camp and finds what was supposed to be a quick buck has become a real-life slasher movie.
Deep in the woods of Kentucky with a supporting cast of B-level celebrities, Clarissa must fight to survive the deadly game that the con’s organizers have rigged against her.
A demented, funny, bloody, and strangely-poignant horror novel. Available now in ebook, paperback, and audiobook!
Tribesmen
“Sick and sardonic and just plain brilliant.” -Duane Swierczynski, author of Fun & Games and Canary
“The best new writer I’ve read in years. Wonderfully lean prose and edge-of-your-seat thrills. Drop everything else and start reading Tribesmen.” -Nate Kenyon, author of Day One and Sparrow Rock
“A cunning, cinematic redmeat feast for weird film lovers and horror freaks, Adam Cesare’s Tribesmen is a first-rate literary midnight movie, and a blistering debut. BRING YOUR FRIENDS!” – John Skipp
“Tribesmen is a gory and clever homage to those Italian cannibal flicks that we all love so dearly, but without the real-life animal cruelty! Highly recommended.” -Jeff Strand, author of Pressure and Wolf Hunt.
“Sometimes everything goes wrong, in the best possible way. Think Snuff and Cannibal Holocau
st meeting at a midnight movie. And then give one of them a camera, the other a knife.” – Stephen Graham Jones, author of It Came from Del Rio, The Gospel of Z and Demon Theory
This novella is available in ebook, audiobook, and paperback
Video Night
“If you put together the gore, action, monsters, and sense of excitement that made ’80s horror movies so great, you’ll only have about half of what makes Video Night a must-read tome for horror fans.” –Horrortalk
“The momentum keeps building. The stakes keep escalating. The monsters just keep getting worse and worse, the catastrophic mayhem more juicy and hopeless. Best of all, the writing moves like a greased torpedo, compulsively readable as it rockets through your brain [...] Adam Cesare’s gonna be a Fango superstar.” – Fangoria
"Video Night is a sharp, smart, energetic novel which pays tribute to all the brilliantly gross horror comedies of the VHS era, even as it carves out its own corners of shock literature." -Daily Grindhouse
Mercy House
“Adam Cesare’s Mercy House is a rowdy, gory, blood-soaked horror tale guaranteed to keep you up at night. And if that was all it was, I’d have been a happy reader. But Cesare has a maturity far and away beyond his years. His characters are treated with a surprising capacity for understanding and empathy, giving them an unexpected depth rarely seen among the nightmare crowd. Mercy House is the kind of novel you sprint through, eating up the pages as fast as you can turn them, and yet it lingers in the mind like a haunting memory, or the ghost of a smell. Cesare is poised to take the reins of the new generation. Looking for the new face of horror? This is it right here.”—Joe McKinney, Bram Stoker Award–winning author of The Dead Won’t Die and Dead City
“Mercy House is 100% distilled nightmare juice. Adam Cesare notches up the horror to nigh-unbearable levels. Even my skin was screaming by the end of this book.”—Nick Cutter, author of The Troop
“Adam Cesare makes his presence felt with Mercy House. A no-holds-barred combo of survival horror and the occult.”—Laird Barron, author of The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All
“This is extreme horror at its best, so don’t step into this book with an uneasy stomach. You must wait sixty minutes after eating before opening up Mercy House.”—LitReactor
This novel is available as an ebook from Random House Hydra.
The First One You Expect
“The First One You Expect is a fast, sexy, fun, dangerous read, and enough of a taste to make me hope Cesare ventures into crime fiction regularly.” -Spinetingler Magazine
“With The First One You Expect, Cesare yet again shows not only his passion and knowledge of the ins and outs of the genre, but he is able to turn it into a riveting and original story that holds a bit of a mirror up to many of us horror fiends.” –HorrorNewsNet
Exponential
"Exponential is fast-paced fun, a rollicking monster movie in 200 quick-moving pages."-Ain'tItCool
"Exponential is an excellent novel, one of the best creature features I've read in years, and will very likely appear on my Top 10 Horror Reads of 2014..." -Horror After Dark
"...Adam Cesare's mix of grim violence and old school horror movie references make for a great read." -Rue Morgue (#152) on Exponential
Pick up this novel in ebook or paperback.
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About the Author
Adam Cesare is a New Yorker who lives in Philadelphia.
His work has been featured in numerous magazines and anthologies. His nonfiction has appeared in Paracinema, The LA Review of Books and other venues. He also writes a (sometimes) monthly column about the intersection of horror fiction and film for Cemetery Dance Online and produces a weekly YouTube review show called Project: Black T-Shirt.
His novels and novellas are available in ebook and paperback from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and all other fine retailers.
Please visit his website to learn more. Author photo by John Urbancik