Michael Patrick Hicks is an author and podcaster, but I first encountered him through his reviews on Goodreads. While not a librarian, Hicks writes reviews that us library workers can use to help patrons. He addresses why someone would like ht ebook, and not just what happens. He encapulsaltes the feel of the book and the type of reader it would appeal to.
On this blog I have a page entitled, "Horror Review Index." While it provides a link to all of my reviews, I also use the page to connect my readers to other review sources I trust. Hicks is on that page.
Here is Hicks NOT reviewing someone else's book, but telling all of you why he loves Horror.
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by Michael Patrick Hicks
Like so many others, I was mercilessly bullied throughout my years in school. I was born with a heart defect that, even after surgery, prevented me from playing highly physical contact sports. I was the outsider, the slow kid, the fat kid, the four-eyed geek, the easy target for name calling and abuse. I got beat-up, had my face slammed into a big, old oak tree, my lunch tray knocked out of my hands while searching for a table in the cafeteria where I could eat alone but rarely in peace. With puberty came depression, because it wasn’t enough to just have a heart full of holes that had needed repair, my brain had to be all fucked up too. Surprisingly, the constant taunts of my peers who would try to push me down the stairs, trip me in the hallway, and ram empty desks into my back during geometry didn’t help my headspace much.
Books did, though. Horror books especially, and Stephen King in particular. I became a Constant Reader early on in high school when I joined the Stephen King Library on a lark, and even as a bit of belligerence and protest against my mom. I’d seen him on one of the Big 3 network morning shows and liked the sound of whatever new release he was promoting back then. Mom thought King looked weird and wrote weird books and didn’t want me reading them. At that point, I had absolutely no choice but to read King, so I went all-in. A short while later, a thick cardboard box arrived on our doorstep. I got a neat skeleton keychain, a hardcover copy of IT, and, man, I was off to the races! Go big or go home, right?
I flew through that sucker in record time, living and breathing that book for the four or five days of summer vacation it took me to plow through its thousand-some pages. For 14-year-old me, it was one of the most intimately relatable reading experiences I ever had, far more than the Shakespeare, Aldous Huxley and F. Scott Fitzgerald stories school demanded I read and damn near killed my love of reading with. But IT? King custom-built that book just for me. I wasn’t just reading about The Loser’s Club, I was a goddamned card-carrying member, and I sat down with Bill, Eddie, Richie, Bev, and Stan in their underground clubhouse, right alongside them. They were fast friends, maybe even the best friends I had at that time, and they weren’t even real. Fleeing the house on Neibolt Street with them and being chased by a werewolf were some of the scariest experiences I’d ever had, and I’d already had my fair share of scary experiences by then, thanks to the jocks who did their damnedest to be my own personal Henry Bowers (as well as Victor and Belch, too, for that matter).
IT took away the pain of daily living for a little while. I was able to escape into a different, yet wholly familiar, world where a group of kids were sharing some of the same struggles I was – and they were confronting them, and winning. Maybe not a first because, hell, what kind of story would that be? IT gave me a measure of hope that I wasn’t getting anywhere else in my life and after that last page was turned? Well. I had plenty of other King books to explore, and lots of other horror authors to discover.
King helped make my life bearable during some very rough, very bad years. And between his doorstopper novels and thick short story collections, there was Dean Koontz’s Watchers and Phantoms and Strangers and Hideaway and Dark Rivers of the Heart. Lots of non-horror stuff, too, from authors like Tom Clancy, Michael Crichton, Dennis Lehane, and Michael Connolly (Blood Work being another fairly relatable book as ex-FBI man Terry McCaleb recovers from a heart transplant). Stephen King opened a lot of doors for me as a reader, and as a writer, too. Hearing him talk about his own writing in Good Morning, America and 60 Minutes interviews made me think I could do this whole writing thing also. His books are what made me first put pen to paper and sign up for a creative writing class in my senior year. Reading allowed me to escape the world I was living in. Writing let me create my own worlds that I, and in turn others, could escape into for a while.
On those days I just didn’t want to get out of bed, angry that I even had to wake up alive in the first place, not wanting to cope with my world anymore, horror books were a comfort. Going to the bookstore to try and find a King or Koontz book I didn’t have, or discover a new-to-me author like Bentley Little or Clive Barker (in the days well before Kindle and the huge world of indie horror writers and publishers we’ve got nowadays) – that got my ass out of bed, that gave me hope, and that made those days worth it.
I still can’t run track, play football, or ride rollercoasters, and I still fight against depression and my razorblade brain that always seeks to cut me quick. It’s all just one day at a time, man. But horror – reading it and writing it – makes those days a little bit easier. And I’m pretty sure horror has saved my life a few times here and there over the years.
ABOUT MICHAEL PATRICK HICKS
Michael Patrick Hicks is the author of several horror books, including the Salem Hawley series and Friday Night Massacre. His stories have appeared in more than a dozen publications from Crystal Lake Publishing, Death’s Head Press, Off Limits Press, and Silver Shamrock Publishing, among others. His debut novel, Convergence, was an Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award Finalist in science fiction. He also co-hosts Staring Into The Abyss, a weekly podcast focused on all things horror, and is a member of the Horror Writers Association.
Michael lives in Michigan with his wife and two children. In between compulsively buying books and adding titles that he does not have time for to his Netflix queue, he is hard at work on his next story.
Website: http://www.michaelpatrickhicks.com
Podcast: https://staringintotheabyss.libsyn.com/
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/mikeh5856
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