Midlisters — Kealan Patrick Burke

No one ever said my work was without merit. Know why? Because I wasn't Hollywood, and I got a free pass because it was literature. I got a free pass because the murder in my books was just a word. Make believe. It meant nothing. Until it happened for real."Jason Tennant is a writer of violent horror novels whose career is mired firmly in a maddening swamp of frustration somewhere north of nowhere and south of success. He is a "midlister", those thankless souls who labor in the shadows of sometimes better, sometimes luckier writers, and it's starting to take its toll. Kent Gray is the wildly popular author of a string of so-called "sex-fi" novels. He's wealthy, handsome, and the object of Jason Tennant's professional jealousy. Welcome to Baltimore, Maryland, and the Aurora Science Fiction & Horror Convention, where these two men, midlister and bestseller, will meet for the first time, and the midlister motto "Better Read Than Dead" will be put to the ultimate test. Because true horror cannot be contained within the pages of a book, or by the men who write them. With an introduction by Jack Ketchum