The Pumpkin Man

Acknowledgments

There’s something about those old urban legends that you hear in grammar school that stick with you for life—like the slumber party dare of repeating “Bloody Mary” three times in front of a dark mirror to tempt the evil Mary Worth to appear and scratch out your eyes. The Pumpkin Man began as an original short story of the same name about kids who come face-to-face with just such an urban legend. (Thanks to Mort Castle for publishing it in Doorways magazine!) The tale set the stage for a very different novel a few years later about events set a couple decades in the future. But both takes on The Pumpkin Man were inspired by those spooky stories that haunt your childhood dreams.

The novel owes its setting to my continuing love affair with the Northern California coast. I was lucky enough to spend quite a few days there right at the start of writing it, thanks to a couple business trips I took to San Francisco. Some of the landscape behind The Pumpkin Man comes from a late 2009 drive I took up to Jenner and a brief stay at the Rio Villa Beach Resort in nearby Guerneville.

As always, music was my constant writing companion, and during this novel I leaned heavily on La Floa Maldita.

There are a thousand people I’d love to acknowledge for their support, and I can’t possibly list them all here, but I have to thank my wife, Geri, and my son, Shaun, for letting me disappear into dark places for hours on end, and my editors Shane Ryan Staley, Don D’Auria, Chris Keeslar, Dave Barnett, Roy Robbins and Mateusz Bandurski, who have all supported and issued editions of my novels.

Thanks also to my first readers: Paul Legerski, Martel Sardina, Erik Smith and Rhonda Wilson, for fixing so many of my fact and grammar gaffes in this manuscript. And a special thanks to some great people who have really gone beyond the call to support my work over the past couple years: Meli Denton, Colum McKnight, Jason R. Davis, P. S. Gifford, Lon Czarnecki, Dave Benton, W. D. Gagliani, Peter D. Schwotzer, Sarah Ham, Jamey Webb, Raymond Brown, Stephen McDornell, John Funderburg, Jonathan Maberry, Bryan Smith, Kresby, Jay Ford, Sheila Halterman, Deb Kuhn, Chris and Angie Fulbright, Damian Maffei, Mike Rankin, Lincoln Crisler, Peg Phillips and Sheila Mallec. You guys make all those long hours of trying to squeeze blood from a stone worth it.