Thriller | Bob Bickford

Reading gets done alone. The writers I love best stay invisible. They understand that reading for pleasure is intensely personal, done on sofas, window seats, and spread-out towels at the beach. It’s done before going to sleep at night. Once in a while it gets done on a streetcar, or an airplane. It’s done with feet up, eating a bag of salt-and-vinegar potato chips and pausing to look out at the rain. It’s solitary and private, and no writer has any business getting in the middle of it.

A good storyteller stays out of sight, behind the green curtain, and hopes like hell the Great Oz is doing his thing out there. The thing is, you never really know if it’s working or not. You write like it’s all a letter to your beloved, a note to God from your deathbed, and then you pray there’s a magic spell in it someplace. If there is, it’s in the reader’s personal experience. You aren’t allowed to see it and you don’t intrude. That’s the way it should be.

It fascinates me, the magic of it, and I want to keep doing it right until the very end of me. When I’m just too old and tired to go on, I want them to find me face-planted on my keyboard. I hope whoever finds me reads what’s on the screen over my dead shoulder and says, “Shit—he didn’t finish it.”

I'm so grateful. You make me very lucky. These stories are a hell of a lot of fun to write, and I hope they're fun to read. I love them, and I hope with all my heart you do, too. I write for you, and I want to hear what you think. Contact me, anytime.

Thank you, past the Moon.

"In the end, it's really a love story about a couple of not-always-easy people

carrying some baggage. You'll find yourself rooting for them."

(William E. Westbrook, Wall Street Journal)

"...evokes Kerouac’s On The Road... But Bickford seems less… pretentious, less interested in making a larger ‘statement’ than simply sharing with us"

(Bart Gazzola, Curated Magazine)

"Bob Bickford is a goddamn revelation. His writing is so amazing, so vivid and sensory that it feels like a memory rising from the deepest part of yourself.

A truth you have always carried in your bones. That's how it feels.

And Christ, it is beautiful."

(Michael Murray, Galaxy Brain Magazine)

"...one of the most beautiful books I've ever read. A classic."

(Sasha Lauren, author of The Paris Predicament)

"Trust me, though, when I tell you how I relished every sentence, and how it made me feel both deeply sad and also full of wonder, how perfectly drawn every character was, even the one we never quite meet, and in short, what a beautiful little book this is."

(Lauren Davis, author of Even So)

"...although he would have you believe he prefers toughing it out with devils in murky back alleys...Bob Bickford dances with the angels."

(Joanna Kafarowski, author of The Polar Adventures of a Rich American Dame)

"...the past is closer than you think. Bickford’s spin on the uncanny is precise and chilling."

(Nyla Matuk, author of 'Stranger')

"A writer of immense talent"

(Rebecca Blissett, author of Fused)