Another excerpt from my short story, A Uniform Shade of Red. This is a reviewer's comment in response to our hapless hero's work. Bear in mind that our hero, Theodore Nathaniel Pendergast, is a struggling author who recently felt the beginnings of success with a series of westerns under the nom de plume of Lash McGraw. Not far into this run of luck, in steps a literary review guru named Storm who ruins it all with a relentless and scathing attack on McGraw's books. In desperation, Pendergast changes his pseudonym to Frederick Sharp and produces a book in the Horror/Mystery genre.

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“Well, well, well, folks. Seems Lash McGraw has changed his name and the genre of his so-called work—the two most creative things he’s done in his life. His latest, NO REST FOR THE WICKED, released by Spellbindery this week, again insults his readers with the same tepid tripe in this hackneyed horrible horror as we found in his weeping willow westerns.

There is one positive note here, though. He has, for the first time, given us a reasonably believable, though dark, twisted hero in the person of Don Sanders. Don is a disgruntled postal employee who wearies of delivering to top floor tenants in a rural, but vertically oriented town in the central U.S. Out of frustration with the way his life is going, Don returns to medical school where he graduates in the top ten percent of his class.

The conflict of this story revolves around Don’s allegiance to the Hippocratic Oath. He grapples with the oath and his inability to give up his nocturnal hobby of performing gruesome axe murders. He feels that the two are incompatible.

The murders, it turns out, get committed after Don has with his insipid little wife, Page. The mere presence of Page tends to take whatever color this uninspired saga might have had and turn it into a uniform shade of neutral (or should that be neutered?) gray. My advice to Don is, stop sleeping with Page, it might turn your whole life around. As for McGraw, now F. Sharp (hit that one on your piano, there’s a clue in the sound), as a writer, you’d make a far better shoe salesman.”