armageddon

What the Future’s Going to Look Like

April 3, 2020 by David Dubrow Leave a Comment

A few days ago President Trump extended the Coronavirus social distancing guidelines to include the entire month of April, which was unwelcome news for everyone save our political/media class of Twitter-addicted shut-ins. A major concern is not just when things will return to normal, but what normal will look like on the other side of this crisis. “We can’t return to business as usual,” the talking heads tell us.

Okay, but what does that mean? I’d like to think that we’ll make significant changes to our geopolitics, but there’s no guarantee that our leaders will do that. No doubt it will be impossible to get a consensus on what those changes should look like, no matter how many people die from COVID-19. Like so much, what happens next is going to be a waiting game while we importune the people we voted for to do what we voted them to do.

For my part, I’m still writing the science fiction adventure series I started last year. (Well, I’m trying to write it with everyone at home.) A theme in this new series is, somewhat unfortunately, a kind of contagion. I’m some time from finishing it, but in light of recent events, I don’t know how the story will be received. I know that there are likely many writers right now developing Coronavirus fiction of all kinds. We’ll see how that works out for them.

Disease was also a theme in my Armageddon trilogy. In the first book, The Blessed Man and the Witch, I introduced the secret war of Heaven versus Hell, with innocent people used as proxies to fight for the holy artifacts that would make a difference in the last battle. The second book, The Nephilim and the False Prophet, showed the characters attempting to stop Hell from gaining an insurmountable advantage, and how a third faction planned to change the nature of the conflict. Finally, in The Holy Warrior and the Last Angel, demons swarm across an Earth in which the angels are terribly outnumbered.

Hell’s victory plan involved the corruption of souls with horror and self-loathing; one way they did that was by releasing a virulent, incurable strain of leprosy. The American government’s response was to set up temporary hospitals (leper colonies) to quarantine the infected. Several characters wound up contracting the disease, which, while not immediately fatal, was nevertheless debilitating and disfiguring. Many sufferers attempted to conceal the symptoms by wearing gloves and/or surgical masks. In the following excerpt from The Holy Warrior and the Last Angel, Ozzie has recently joined up with Aidan, a teenage leprosy patient who fled a burning hospital in a stolen ambulance with Mrs. Cai; Lem, a bar owner now driving the ambulance; and Patty, a regular at Lem’s bar.

—

Ozzie glanced over his shoulder and found himself eyeball-fucking the weird, mute Mrs. Cai, who stared back and said nothing. Patty hadn’t moved. Aidan happened to look in his direction, and seeing him said, “Ozzie? Can I ask you something?”

Mierda. The kid hadn’t shut up for more than five minutes since they started this trip, and now Ozzie had broken the welcome silence by looking at him.

“What,” Ozzie said.

Aidan swallowed. “Uh…we’re all gonna have to fight, right? Fight the…the demons. Once we find the five angels.”

Ozzie didn’t reply.

“It’s just that…it’s not that I’m too scared to. You know, to fight. I mean, I am scared, but…well…I can’t see real well. I was gonna get cataract surgery next week, but…” Aidan lifted his gauze-wrapped hands. “And…the nerves in my fingers are shot. The ones I got left. I can’t feel anything.”

Leaning back, Lem glanced sidelong at Ozzie.

“We ain’t gonna leave you on the side of the road just ‘cause you’re sick, manito,” Ozzie said. “Just do what you can and stay out the way.”

“Can the angels cure us? You know, me and Mrs. Cai. People got cured in the Bible all the time.”

Ozzie shook his head. “No lo sé. Maybe.” He turned back around.

Squeezing the steering wheel hard enough to make his yellow rubber gloves squeak, Lem murmured, “I got it, too. The leprosy.”

“Sí. I know.”

Lem didn’t look at him. “I ain’t took these gloves off in five days. Afraid to see what my hands look like now.”

“Sí. Deal. We all got problems.”

Scowling, Lem shook his head and said, “We need gas.”

“Can we make it? We’re almost at the Lincoln Tunnel.”

“This thing drinks more gas than a Caddy. You want it to shit the bed in the Tunnel? What if we got to chase the angels around like we did in Philly?”

—

Take care, and stay healthy.

Armageddon: Know Your Drug Dealer

November 22, 2019 by David Dubrow Leave a Comment

(You are looking at my Chirper feed, aren’t you? It’s like Twitter, but so much better!)

I included stigmata in my Armageddon trilogy because I figured that if you were going to describe a Biblical apocalypse, with demonic possession, angelic visitations, and holy relics, you should also throw in associated supernatural/Judeo-Christian phenomena, like people afflicted with the Wounds of Christ. For storytelling purposes, it wasn’t enough for those with stigmata to just bleed: the agonies they felt also gave them psychic abilities like prognostication and knowing when a holy relic or demonically-possessed person was nearby. The Wounds always hurt, but the pain increased in proximity to the supernatural.

Once I got that squared away, I had to decide who to give these Wounds to. I wanted those afflicted to be a kind of living holy relic, highly sought-after by the forces of both Hell and Heaven. Some religious people would get the stigmata, certainly. But I also wanted to inflict stigmata on other people: ones you might consider undeserving. Unlikely. Non-believers.

To make things interesting, I decided to have my stigmata-afflicted character be a drug dealer, and I named him Ozzie. From the outset, I wanted Ozzie to go from a bad person to a less-bad person. He would become a hero, of sorts, and a believer in Christ through sheer pragmatism. The third book in the trilogy is called The Holy Warrior and the Last Angel for a reason: Ozzie becomes the titular Holy Warrior. The least likely holy warrior you could imagine. A murderer and thief, a peddler of drugs, a gang member who would kill you for looking at him the wrong way, or even the right way. A cruel man who never smiled, not once.

His transformation throughout the novels is something to be read rather than described. But in creating Ozzie, I had to work out who he was. You could just hang a label on someone and call it a day: he’s a killer. A gangbanger. Whatever. But it doesn’t invite you to look deeper, and as I needed Ozzie to be an important character in whose head you’d be staying from time to time, I had to work out his details and background.

Okay, so he’s a drug dealer. What does that mean? Where does he deal drugs? How does he get them? What does a drug deal look like, exactly? It’s not like you go to the mall and pick up crystal meth at a kiosk. And if he’s in a gang, what kind of gang? How is the gang organized? What’s his role in the hierarchy?

I never bought drugs outside of a pharmacy, so I had no personal experience to draw from. So I had to do research. As this is a fictional character who happens to be in a fictional gang, I drew the vast majority of my cues from fiction: books and movies. New Jack City. Training Day. American Gangster. Blood in, Blood Out. Colors. I pored over news articles and interviews of drug dealers in and out of prison. Over time I got a vague picture, but the details eluded me: I couldn’t just borrow characters and situations from other people’s work.

So I had to make it up. I created a New York City drug gang, from the boss of the city to individual territories within certain boroughs. The territory bosses had free rein within their turf, but had to send their monthly cut to the borough boss. Independence with limits. Once I had the hierarchy, I could plug in various characters, who then had their roles to play, including Ozzie.

Some readers told me that they found the gang stuff to be pretty realistic, but I didn’t tell them that I made it up myself, according to how I’d run an illegal drug operation. In the end, it worked: it provided the necessary framework for both character motivations and story, and how things turn out for Ozzie was dependent on how he started out as a territory boss in Brooklyn, New York. Ozzie, being a cunning sort, used his clairvoyance and precognition to great personal advantage until…well, you’ll just have to read about what happened in The Blessed Man and the Witch.

And if writing doesn’t work out, I may have career options in the field of extralegal intoxicant distribution. We’ll see how it goes.

Podcast Interview: Another Bleeping Podcast

October 8, 2019 by David Dubrow Leave a Comment

I was recently interviewed on a podcast titled Another #@%*! Podcast on KLRN Radio. This was a live interview, no do-overs or editing.

Despite that, I killed it, of course. I discussed my Armageddon series, the Appalling Stories series, publishing in general, and some of the inherent problems with conservative media that prevent books like Appalling Stories from getting wider distribution on the right. Plus, as an added bonus, I described, for the first time in any public forum, what I’m working on right now!

Click here to listen. It’s the best 30 minutes of audio you’ll hear all day!

The Armageddon Series: The Rest of the Story

October 24, 2018 by David Dubrow 2 Comments

I started writing the Armageddon trilogy in early 2013, with the outline of The Blessed Man and the Witch. My intent was to follow the original Star Wars trilogy style: set up the overarching concern in the first volume (in this case, the end of the world), have the main characters try and fail to overcome this concern in the second volume (The Nephilim and the False Prophet), and then complete the story of good versus evil in the third volume, The Holy Warrior and the Last Angel. So it’s taken me close to six years to write and publish all three books.

Overall, I saw my intent through in the writing. Each book in the trilogy comprises a segment of the overall story of the end of the world. Each character had an individual character arc in not just each book, but through the entire trilogy. When characters like Hector and Siobhan and Ozzie and Kyle weren’t driving events themselves, they were affected by other events, which then altered how they acted in response to future events. Some characters underwent significant transformation both physically and spiritually, like Reyna and Siobhan. Others stayed more consistent…and suffered for it. I wanted to make them as much like real people as possible without robbing the reader of entertainment. If you make everything too realistic, with the real world’s lack of closure and unspoken secrets and unfulfilled ambitions, nobody’ll want to read it. So everything gets wrapped up in the story.

My success in all these things needs to be judged by the reader. Of course I’m going to say I did a good job.

I had two themes that I wanted to bring out in the third book to keep it from becoming a tedious recitation of descriptive horror at the end of the world; these themes guide my faith, so I think they’re important. The first theme is that God is all good all the time. There’s an objective good in the novel, represented by God and His angels, and there’s an objective evil, represented by the Devil and his demons. The second theme builds on the first: even if we don’t know what God has planned for us, we should trust that He is all good all the time, and knows what’s best for us. In other words, I wanted to make the issue of faith a driving force in the story without preaching. So many of the characters (who were areligious or, at the very least, pretty secular before the first page of the first book) come to faith through pragmatism. They learn from their experiences. It’s what mature adults do.

Except for the ones who don’t. And we see what happens to them.

Robert Thorn, Damien’s father in The Omen, wasn’t a religious man until evidence showed him that his son was the Antichrist. Chris MacNeil didn’t believe in the Devil until her daughter was possessed by a demon in The Exorcist. You get it.

Despite all my planning, there were certain story elements, particularly the Watchers’ plan to save humanity, that I hadn’t fully realized until writing the second and third books. I knew it was all going somewhere, but I wasn’t sure where until the end. Dunno how I came up with the Watcher’s Ark. Or what it would look like inside. I can say that Naram-Sin’s Nephilim body came to me in a dream.

But somehow I got there. I got to the end. While I was stalled on certain story elements I wrote or contributed to other books, like the Appalling Stories series. But I always knew I’d finish this story, as difficult as it was. Hopefully it’s satisfying.

What’s next? Something more science fiction-oriented. Less heavy. Smaller stakes. Not as dark. But I think you’ll enjoy it. I’m done with horror for the time being. I’ve written the horror story I always wanted to write. That’s not so bad.

My Big, Fat…Armageddon Sale!

October 12, 2018 by David Dubrow Leave a Comment

To celebrate the long-awaited release of The Holy Warrior and the Last Angel, the third book in my Armageddon series, Amazon has lowered the price of the first two books to $0.99 each!

The first book of the series, The Blessed Man and the Witch, depicts the return of the world to a Time of Miracles, where stigmata-stricken psychics, hapless occultists, and unwitting innocents are used as proxies for the final war between Heaven and Hell:

How can you possibly prepare for the end of the world? The end of everything? Armageddon is right around the corner, and there’s no guarantee that Heaven’s going to be the victor. Hell is real, it’s clawing at the edges of the Pit, and its demonically possessed servants are right now gathering powerful artifacts as weapons of war. The End Times are coming. Are you ready?

In the second book, The Nephilim and the False Prophet, Hell’s plans for winning Armageddon bear horrific fruit, harrowing the Earth:

Fueled by brutal, random violence and a worldwide leprosy epidemic, the world descends into chaos. Preparing for Armageddon, Hell plans an atrocity called The Slaughter of the Innocents while Heaven’s scattered agents fight a cold war against superstar evangelist Kyle Loubet, who they believe is the False Prophet foretold in the Bible. The Eremites walk the Earth: black magicians kept alive through unholy relics. Terrible visions assail the world’s remaining psychics, promising an eternal night of blood and fire and endless agony. Caught in the middle, Hector, Ozzie, and Siobhan face terrible dangers from all sides. Now free from their infernal prison, what are the Watcher angels planning? With only days before the Apocalypse, can humanity be saved?

That’s three full-length novels of gripping, Biblical horror for less than $5.00. A steal!

The Holy Warrior and the Last Angel Is Live!

October 10, 2018 by David Dubrow Leave a Comment

I can hardly believe it myself, folks, but the conclusion to the Armageddon trilogy is here! The world ends not with a whimper, but a bang, and you can read all about it:

Armageddon is now. Demons have risen from the Pit to inflict torment, despair, and death throughout the world. The Watchers’ Ark has taken uncounted millions of people away, but is it a life-saving Utopia, or just another Hell?

While Hector the Blessed Man fights malevolent Nephilim outside of Creation itself, Ozzie finds himself outnumbered by ravening hordes of demons on Earth. Kyle, the Herald of Armageddon, discovers that being a true Prophet of the Lord is a burden far more terrible than he could have imagined, stretching his faith to the breaking point.

As Hell destroys every last good thing on Earth, where are the angels? Who can save us from eternal damnation when even Heaven is threatened?

Concluding the epic story of the end of the world that began with The Blessed Man and the Witch and continued in The Nephilim and the False Prophet, The Holy Warrior and the Last Angel is a novel that will appeal to fans of William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist, David Seltzer’s The Omen, and Thomas F. Monteleone’s The Blood of the Lamb.

Years in the making, The Holy Warrior and the Last Angel draws everything to a close. Is there hope, love, or faith in God to be found at the end of the world? Will anyone survive? Click to find out!