line is this. Wes takes very odd things and finds their connections; his juxtapositions are amazing and original and just the sort of thing I like.
This is a book that could almost have been written for me.
I can’t give it higher compliment than that.
As I said, I won’t talk much about the stories, but anyone who can write “Tarzan Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” has my respect; white-hot prose that rolls like a well-oiled roller coaster with briars in the seats, containing screaming patrons with those briars up their ass.
Wes is absolutely fearless. Maybe that’s why so much of his work has appeared in small magazines. I know. That’s how I started my career, and bless those little magazines.
I have a feeling this collection, containing such gems as the aforementioned story, and some personal favorites like “Catfish Gods” and “The Secret Lives Of Heroes”, is about to burst onto the scene like a comet streaking across the sky, entering our atmosphere, leaving in its smoking wake skywriting from its tail that says: WES OCHSE, HE’S GOOD.
And he is.
So now, I fade away, and leave you with the stories.
All writers know that in the end, that’s what it’s about.
The stories.
Here they are. Enjoy. I know you will.
Joe R. Lansdale
Nacogdoches, Texas
MULTIPLEX – a movie theater complex with three or more screens. North America's first multi-screen theater was The Elgin Theatre, created in 1957 by Nat Taylor in Ottawa, Ontario.
FANDANGO – a style of folk and flamenco music and dance. It arose as a dance of courtship in Andalusia in southern Spain early in the 18th century. As a result of the extravagant features of the dance, the word fandango is used as a synonym for 'a quarrel', 'a big fuss' or 'a brilliant exploit.'
Pop-culture references include:
Procol Harum's song "Whiter Shade of Pale" contains the line We skipped the light fandango.
Queen's song "Bohemian Rhapsody" contains the line Scaramouch, Scaramouch, will you do the fandango?
The 1985 film Fandango starring Kevin Costner and Judd Nelson about five college students from Texas in 1971 who go on a 'last' road trip together, before facing graduation, marriage, and the Draft for the Vietnam War.
MULTIPLEX FANDANGO – a pop-culture, theatrical, book presentation of the works of Weston Ochse on Sixteen High-Definition literary screens.
Table of Contents
Sixteen Screens of Mayhem, Madness and Horror
Screen 1 Tarzan Doesn’t Live Here Anymore
Screen 2 22 Stains in the Jesus Pool
Screen 3 Fugue on the Sea of Cortez
Screen 4 Big Rock Candy Mountain
Screen 5 The Sad Last Love of Cary Grant
Screen 6 Catfish Gods
Screen 7 Forever Beneath the Scorpion Tree
Screen 8 High Desert Come to Jesus
Screen 9 Low Men Weeping
Screen 10 The Secret Lives of Heroes
Screen 11 Hiroshima Falling
Screen 12 The Crossing of Aldo Ray
Screen 13 The Smell of Leaves Burning in Winter
Screen 14 A Day in the Life of a Dust Bunny
Screen 15 City of Joy
Screen 16 Redemption Roadshow
NOW SHOWING ON SCREEN 1
Tarzan Doesn’t
Live Here Anymore
Starring Andy Friarson as Tarzan
and the Mexican Girl as Lady Jane
“The monstrous love child of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Jules Verne and Quentin Tarantino. The Legend of Tarzan will never be the same again!”
–Stardust Magazine
A SENSAROUND GLAMARAMA PRODUCTION
“Me Tarzan. You Jane.”
– Johnny Weissmuller, Tarzan the Apeman, 1932
The earth was rent as if a leviathan had burst free to sail the galaxy for better worlds to chew. Four miles long, hundreds of feet at its widest point, and more than a thousand feet deep, the Sonoran Rift was one of a hundred that had rent the Earth in the past three years. No one knew where they came from nor why they happened. Most had been kept a secret, but those like the Baltimore Scar and the Edmonton Crater, couldn’t be ignored. But the Sonoran Rift was the largest of them all, and if it hadn’t been for a disenchanted soldier spilling his guts to the network, no one would have ever had an inkling about it.
Andy’s network had tried four times to get someone near enough to corroborate the unbelievable statements the dying soldier had made, and each of their reporters had failed to return. The idea that another rift existed would be a news coup for the network that could garner millions in advertizing.
“Do you think what they say is true?” asked Leon, who rose from checking one of the seventy claymore mines in their sector.
That there are monsters in there? Andy didn’t even want to give voice to the thought, so he just stared.