K. Marvin Bruce

Long before I read much Stephen King (I only started on King in my late 40s), I had made up a fictional town.  King is well known for his fictional towns of Derry and Jerusalem’s Lot (‘Salem’s Lot) in Maine.  These are lands of magical realism where the paranormal happens, but people act just as people do. My fictional town is Breck, New Hampshire.  One of my published stories, “Good for the Gander,” is set in Breck.  Since my fiction hasn’t yet found a wide readership, nobody would realize just how many of my stories are set in my fictional town. Like most working writers, I write in fits and starts.  I begin each day with writing time, but occasionally it is harried by work and daily life issues.  I begin, continue, and finish stories and move on.  Most of them have never been sent out for rejection. Recently I realized that my Breck stories might start to interlock.  I had started a novel about Breck some years ago, to introduce th...

A guilty pleasure, I’ll confess, is reading the Dark Shadows novels by Marilyn Ross.  As a child I found these stories tucked away in a paperback bin at the local second-hand store.  If I could find one I hadn’t read, I would snatch it up for a few cents and begin reading right away. Formulaic and predictable, the little books always evoked a stormy atmosphere of the Maine coast.  I’d never been to Maine, but watching the soap opera had cast an image in my young mind that would stay with me for life. When, as an adult, I grew nostalgic for the paperbacks I’d sold back so long ago, I found them difficult to locate.  ABE, the friend of lost treasures, led me back to most of them, followed by Bookfinder.  Re-reading them, however, I notice the lack that young eyes just couldn’t see. I’m not sure when I realized Marilyn Ross was actually a pen name for Dan Ross (or properly William Edward Daniel Ross).  I was, however, acutely aware that thes...