Hello, and welcome to Castle Talk, where we talk to writers and creators of today's genre worlds. I'm your host Jason Henderson, publisher at castle Bridge Media, home of the Castle of Horror anthology series. Tonight, RI chatting with Christopher Michlos, author of and I love this title, Ticktown, which comes out this month from castle Bridge Media, which full disclosure, I am a publisher at castle Bridge Media, so I am instrumental in this. But I love this book and
I love its icky content. It is the kind of paperback from hell I've been wanting to talk about for a long time. So here's the deal. In the book, I have this right in front of me. When a northern Wisconsin touristtown becomes the feeding ground for a giant band of mutant ticks giant ticks, a young reporter or copbex boyfriend and a newspaper man have to track down and destroy the Queen Tick and her nest before these
monsters overrun and slaughter the entire town. It is grody, it is summary, and it is full of giant I can't stress this enough giant ticks. So welcome Christopher.
Hey, thanks so much. Jason, I really appreciate it. You know it's funny.
Oh. I just started the last I would say the last couple of weeks.
I didn't realize what a perfect summer book it is, because especially here in Wisconsin where I am, there's ticks everywhere. And my daughter was My daughter's been convinced. And maybe it's just because I've had the advanced copies of the book. Later on, she's convinced she had ticks in her hair. We always think we've got ticks on the dog. I mean it's it's the summer brings ticks in Wisconsin, and so I didn't quite realize what great timing we were going to have in releasing this book.
But these ticks are like the size of They're like when you think of Rob and Batman and Robin when Robin gets eaten by a giant clam.
They're like that.
They're like they are they are big, and so they can cleave a person and do cleave a person in half. And I okay, so let me ask you. You you've said that you had a distinct vision in mind basically that this was your ode to well, probably several things, because I think of like giant bugs, you know, like like you know James, like, uh, you know, Peter Graves versus the Big Ants, but also the the nineteen seventies
Paperbacks from Hell. So talk to me a little bit about about that, that gulash of inspiration.
Well sure you actually earlier you used the phrase Paperbacks from Hell, and I read, you know, I would say, maybe five years ago something like that, the book Paperbacks from Hell, written by Grady Hendrix and will Ericson, which is this survey of seventies and eighties pulp paperbacks, so paperbacks in general, but a lot of pulp or paper and I had had very little exposure to to that, to those books and tell that.
And as I read this book.
I was just flabbergast about how wonderfully gonzo and terrific it all sounded, you know, these these crazy plot lines, these over the top.
You know heroes, and on and on.
And after I finished the book, I started picking up and reading some of these books. One of my first was was Knight of the Crabs by Guyane Smith, and I fell so in love with his his vision of these giant crabs terrorizing the Welsh countryside. And I think in part because it brought me back to the movies I loved when I was a young kid.
I grew up on classic.
Old horror, the Universal, Frankenstein and Dracula and Wolfman, all those yes, But I loved, loved, loved the giant creature feature of movies like them. From those were the paperbacks that I started to gravitate towards. And then I so,
I'm a filmmaker. A couple of movies last night, small independent features, but I started to think that I wanted to I wanted to write a novel, and so it became clear that the kind of novel that I was going to write was going to be a pulpy paperback novel, and I wanted to do something that was somewhat of a mash up between those fifties and sixties sci fi movies and the seventies and eighties pulp horror paperbacks and giant mutated tics in Northern.
Wisconsin ended up being the perfect the perfect mix of the two.
So you've actually, you know, you've tried to kind of get people into the spirit of of you know, monsters in the summer, like sort of harkening back to that vision, like don't you have an event? Were you gonna be showing like some monster movies.
Or something super excited.
Yeah, So the book comes out on Tuesday, June twenty fourth in paperback and kindle, and that next weekend on June twenty eighth, Saturday, June twenty eighth, my books launch event.
Is going to be screening.
I'm going a host of screening of the nineteen fifty four movie Them that I referenced at a local theater at Marcus Palace Theater. Have a loan Madison is going to introduce the movie and say a few words about the movie. We're going to have a screening, and then afterwards they have a nice lounge with a bar and food and that sort of thing right in the theater, and we're going to go over there and do a book signing and a reception and the lounge.
And what is really.
Fun about the event is the screening. The movie screening at four point thirty on Saturday afternoon. Your ticket to the event is going to be a paperback copy of So if you get a paperback copied of Ticktown you bring it to the event, it's worth two seats to the screening. So I'm going to be doing local media and pr you know, interviews and some other things locally to promote where here in Madison. There's gonna be several bookstories that are carrying the paperback of a book when
it comes out on June twenty fourth. If people can't get that, you can't get their hands on that, they can always order from Amazon, you know, if they have Prime, they'll definitely get it by the weekend. And worst case scenario is that we'll have some books for sale at the event that people can get it.
But I thought it would be a fun thing.
I have a good relationship with the theater because of my film background, and they were just absolutely ecstatic about the idea, like super supportive. In fact, I'm going over there in the morning tomorrow to test out the movie.
And kind of talk to them about logistics.
So I appreciate you mentioning it because I'm just so excited about it.
I really love that though. I mean that that because to me that those are those are memories. Like when I talk to my dad, one of his clearest memories of when he was a kid was going to some event where they were showing creature from the Black Lagoon, and and you know, he just has it, and you know, that just the community, community of Monster kids and the community of Monster movies is just to me one of those weird American things that that is just always worth celebrating.
Especially I mean, I know I'm hitting the summer really hard, but it's so true, like in the summer, I think, at least since in my lifetime, at least since Jaws came out, summer is the time for monsters, you know, And and so I just love that you've sort of gone after that talk to me a little bit about like that's fantastic, But getting down to the nitty gritty of your process, how did you knock yourself into getting a book done? Like, how did it? How did it?
How did it come together? Did you like have to say, well, Chris, I'm gonna have to sit down and knock out five hundred words a day, or I'm going to get this done by labor day, or or how did it come together for you?
That's actually an interesting question because I wasn't really thinking of it in those in those terms. Even though I hadn't written a novel before, I've written several screenplays, and so the process for me of writing down and writing a screenplay is, you know, just kind of sitting down kind of you know, really roughly plotting it out and
then just banging through it. I have a I have a daughter who's now eleven, and so during during the school year, I try to get up, you know, five o'clock five thirty because I worked best in the morning, try and knock out, you know, as much as I can for a few hours before I you know, get it ready for school. Then a couple hours after I get her off to school, and it was just a matter of trying to uh, you know, try to do
it as as efficiently as I can. I was actually I started writing the novel because I was writing the screenplay that I was extremely excited about. I won't tell you too much about it. I want to tell you what it's about, but it's called Jingle Bell Chop, and it was I was. I was just loving writing.
It was kind of a horror comedy, of holiday horror comedy.
And I literally got to the halfway point and I just froze and I could not figure out where to go with it.
Next.
I plotted it out, but it just seems so suddenly static, and so I thought, oh my god, I've got to put this aside.
You know, I can't go any further right now.
I thought, maybe this will be a good time to start writing a novel, so I threw myself into Ticktown.
It had been, you know, it had been germinating in my.
Head up to that point, but I decided that that was going to be my focus. I would say I probably started in you know, February ish of or maybe maybe a little later March or April of twenty twenty three. I think it was done by the end of the year.
Just in terms of the you know, the book itself. I go.
I went through a couple of drafts, a few drafts, and then, you know what I'm really bad at is letting people read my stuff. But I had this book that had gone through several drafts. I took it to my best buddy, Jay, who reads my He's always my first reader with short fiction, and he's not that.
Into horror at all. He's my code director on my horror movies, but he doesn't read horror.
And I gave it to him and I said, you know, I don't know if you're gonna like this at all, because it's not what you read. I don't know if it's any good. You know, the writing may suck. I have no idea. But I realized when I was done with it and when I was giving it to him, and I told him, I said, all that doesn't matter, because I realized that it was exactly.
The book that I wanted to write.
The tone, the pacne, the just kind of the approach of it, how it kind of read like one of these seventies eighties pulp horror things. It was just exactly what I had meant to write. So I told him, you take it. You know, I want on his feedback, but honestly, it's it's what I want. So that's good enough. You know, it was what I wanted it to be, and that was well good enough. But he was very encouraging.
He said he had a great time reading it, and so that gave me a lot of a lot of confidence to pitch it to agents and eventually to publishers, and it was a it.
Was a great process.
I just you know, I was very lucky to find an agent pretty quickly. I was very lucky to get offers from people at castle Bridge Media. And I don't I don't I don't overlook or miss the fact of how lucky I am. You hit the right people at the right time, and good things can happen.
Well, I I just sort of think it's it's when it's difficult because speaking as a publisher, it is exactly what it is intended to be. It is a celebration of this kind of story that I don't get to see enough of. Actually, let me ask you a question
about that. Why do you think we gravitate to you know, because right now, everybody's worried about tariffs, and they're worried about the worried about the Middle East, and they're worried about they're worried about the four oh one K. Why does somebody go all right, I want to sit down and read a story about ticks eating people like like and some and a couple of good guys trying to stop them, Like, like, why why does that keep? Why are we like that? Why is this so interesting to us?
I think I'd be extremely wealthy if I had an answer to that question, And to be honest with you, I will say that, you know, for me, it's just it's very nostalgic. Like I said, I I love these old horror movies. When I was a kid, I used to. I used to spend a lot of time with my grandparents.
You know, my parents would love to go out on the weekends, and I'd go spend a night or two with my grandparents, and my grandmother always let me stay up with her and watch, you know, the local superstation that was showing you know, I don't even remember who the horror host was, but you know, one of those one of those goofy, undead horror hosts, and they'd play a lot of these movies and I have very fond, warm memories of watching those with my grandma. And it's
a very nostalgic thing. And you know, I'm not I'm a new author, but I'm not a young kid, and I think that there is definitely something about that kind of nostalgic take you back to.
When you were young, and when you were kind of you know.
Free spirited and and all those things that made you happy in a much simpler time.
I'm, you know, someone.
Who's very interested in the terrif issue, and he is very politically motivated. My background is political communication. I spent twenty years as a partner in a political media firm, do an advocacy and political media and working for candidates and organizations and all that. So that stuff is very important to me, but it ain't fun at all. And so sometimes you just want to have fun and you want to, you know, you want to just kind of put that stuff in the background and kind of indulge
something that just makes you happy. A close friend we had some friends over for a dinner who we don't see very off and several weeks ago, and she was asking me about the book and she said, well, what's the what's the political you know what, you know, what's the political message of the book or you know, is it global warming or is it? And I was like, there's not any political message to this book. It is sheer, propulsive, nostalgic fun.
That's all it is.
It's so that's so funny. There's real joy that comes across in it. That's the funny thing Like that just sort of gonzo uh uh. You know, bedlam of the of of the book comes across as a real joy and it reminds me, you know, like Stephen King talked about Horror of Party Beach, basically where monsters are created. So because some dufices drop like some nuclear waste into this into the near the beach, and it makes monsters
and they eat they eat bikini girls. And like those guys were not interested in nuclear power like that is not the creators of that movie didn't really care about nuclear waste. It was just it was just a handwavy thing to say, monsters, Right, So I love it. I
think that's okay. Before we go, I want you to tell us a little bit about your main characters because people want to know, all right, giant ticks, So who is tell us about about who the characters are that people can come to know as they're as they're bound.
Sure.
So the story takes place in a fictional town in northern Wisconsin, a small tourist town, kind of tucked in the woods.
It's called Tomahawk Hollow.
It doesn't exist, but it is, you know, very much the kind of town I imagine is that is all over the country, but it's definitely very much a Midway.
A lot of people in the Midwest will recognize this town.
A small population, you know, rural nestled in the woods. You know, you drive through them in Wisconsin all the time. There's usually a church, a bar, a school, and sometimes that's about it. Tomahawk coll is a little more developed than that. But the uh, the the story. The central characters in the story are Jackson and Emmeline. He's the publisher of a of a small town newspaper, and Emmeline
is his cub reporter. She's a Native American, a young Native American woman who's been working for him, you know, for for a short period of time. Honestly, when I started to write Ticktown, I I I meant to make it kind of a somewhat of a commentary on the you know, the dying out of of local media like that. You know, you don't find these small town newspapers that much anymore.
They used to be a big deal. They're not anymore.
And I thought the idea of of of big media conglomerates, you know, swallowing up and you know, uh evolving and destroying the you know, the the smaller would be an interesting theme to you know, uh, to go along with giant ticks who have evolved, you know, to gobble up you know, local So there's a little bit of that in there, But I didn't go too far with it because I lost interest in that and started having fun
with cleaving people in half. But Jackson and them line are they you know, they start hearing about local local livestock being slaughtered, they go to investigate it, and and you know, they discover, you know, that that there's not only giant ticks in the woods that but that it may be tied to a shady overseas organization that that owned the local pesticides plant. I learned very quickly and write, in reading the pulp horror stuff of the seventies and eighties,
you gotta have vaguely Nazi characters involved in this. You know, there's got to be some sort of you know, nastiness out there. I'm there's Jaws in the DNA because there's kind of a corrupt mayor in Ticktown, which was who was a ton of fun to write, Mayor Cankerby, who is kind.
Of a uh he's a.
Cross between Mayor Vaughan from Jaws and Boss Hog from The Dukes of Hazzard. You know, that's kind of how I thought of him. But he was he was a ton of fun to write.
Uh So, so those are the main characters.
There's also a cop, the local chief of police, who, as he says at.
One point in in the uh in the book.
That it's a kind of a uh, it's kind of an uh, just an honorary title that goes to the only cop in town. He becomes the chief of police, so he's he's on his own, and he's got to figure out what's going on, not just these tics, but with this foreign company and these people who've come into the town. And this is all of course happening in amid the amidh the preparations for the big Fall festival, the Harvest Moon Jubilee, so you know, it's all very
people will find it very familiar. The characters are very familiar.
I interesting.
This is my first book, so I don't know, I never knew what to expect from arc readers, but my ARC readers have been extremely enthusiastic. And what I hear a lot from the ARC reviews has been, you know, very tropy, but with an original twist. You're going to recognize the characters, but you're going to love the characters.
You know.
I think, kind of getting to what we talked about earlier about this nostalgic factor. I've heard a lot of that in the ARC reviews and in the traditional reviews. You know, people have have reacted to this idea that boy, this is all very familiar, but it's it's updated and it's more modern, and it's got its own twist to it.
I mean, I think I think people have and will like that kind of combination of nostalgic fun, you know, characters they recognize, but that are you know, that have cell phones, you know, and so on and so forth.
So, uh, yeah, I that's what I think. That's I loved the characters and I felt like they were really well drawn. I mean, you know, I like the bad guys checking in at the hotel and everything.
There's just wonderful details. And I did recognize this town. This is like this is like a dark shadow of a Hallmark movie, really, where you've got everybody knows one another, but they are ticks seating people. I just really love that.
All right.
So I've been talking to Christopher Miklos. Tell us again about the date of your event and the release. The release is tuesday, but yeah, give us your dates and where can people find it?
Sure? So the.
Release date is Tuesday, June twenty fourth. My event is on the book launch event is on Saturday, June twenty eighth. My website is Christophermichlos dot com. It's my name, and I've got information about the book launch there. I've got, of course links where you can buy, and I've also got a running list of bookstores that are going to be stocking the book.
I've been very excited.
There's a lot of Wisconsin bookstore that are going to stock the book. I you know, as my publisher, you'll be interested, you know. I was reaching out to several several bookstores in the state and in the surrounding area, and I reached out to this horror bookshop in Chicago called Bucket of Blood and said, hey, you might be interested in this book, and they wrote me back and said, oh yeah, we've already had that on pre order now for a couple of weeks. So I was just thrilled
about that. Hopefully there's more of that out there that I haven't come across, but I've got so I've got a Chicago bookstore, I've got some books that are going to be in Brooke and Mortar store in San Francisco, in Brooklyn and and all around the state here. And I'm still working it so I'm not done yet. So hopefully people will be able to find the book in some local bookstores. Definitely get it online at Amazon, Barnesonoble
dot com, wherever you shop for your books. But come to my come to my website Christopher Michelos dot com, and you'll be able to You'll be able to see information about where it is and how you can get it, end where you can go to not just this first event, but other signings that I've got lined up over the next several months.
Fantastic, Chris, it's been such a delight talking about this. I think it's such a fun book. I hope you have a wonderful event. I will talk to you soon. Thank you very much, sir, thanks so much. We'll talk to you soon.
Have a good night. Bye.