Radio Lake Press
I Shop At Laney’s
A JEFF JOHNSON NOVELLA
Laney Bozeman works at a lonely roadside junk shop in a remote corner of New Mexico. He reads old paperbacks and daydreams on his two week shifts, and by night he stargazes and dabbles in the kitchen of the tiny attendant's bungalow. He sleeps in his truck during his time off and explores, though lately he’s been carrying on with the beautiful clerk Maria from Big Donut in Roswell, so a different life might be on the horizon.
The old carnie Ralston Orley is always supposed to be gone when Laney arrives for their bimonthly sunset shift change. This time he's still there, half naked and blackout drunk, and he’s dragged something huge into the bungalow’s living room, something big enough to change their lives forever.
“I haven’t had this much fun reading anything since I read True Grit years back. I Shop At Laney’s is an utterly original book with a wild strange plot made plausible by voice and setting details and exceptional writing. Overnight I find that I’m a Jeff Johnson fan.” —World Fantasy Award Winner James P. Blaylock
“Jeff Johnson is a master of characterization and suspense. I Shop At Laney’s will keep you riveted and enchanted from the first page to the last.” —Robert J. Sawyer, Nebula winner and Hugo Award-winning author of The Oppenheimer Alternative
“…lowdown drunken partners on the realistic poverty road, what seems like fantasy for most of the story, becomes advanced science fiction at the end, and makes it into unified fiction that works wonderfully.” —Norman Spinrad, Prix Apollo winner
Jeff Johnson is the acclaimed author of Tattoo Machine, The Crimes of Darby Holland Trilogy- Lucky Supreme, A Long Crazy Burn, and The Animals After Midnight, as well as Deadbomb Bingo Ray, Knottspeed, and Everything Under The Moon. I Shop At Laney’s is the first novella of three in The Menu Collection.
STAY TUNED FOR THE SAUCIER, NOVELLA NUMBER TWO IN THIS EXCITING TRILOGY!
Author Jeff Johnson is in France, hard at work on this, and novella number three, LOCOMATIC. With luck, he also has some great travel writing on the way!
Fewkhead
by COLSON FERRO
Earl Fewks enjoys retirement about as much as he thought he would- he plays golf, he coaches boxing, and he watches TV. This holding pattern is interrupted when he gets word that his estranged older brother died unexpectedly, leaving Earl to deal with the estate. The late Walter Fewks had always been a con man, and he’d been working as an adjunct professor of American history at a small but prestigious college in Connecticut, where he and his associates amassed blackmail material to extort the student body. The victims are the sons and daughters of the American elite. One of them has become deadly. With a target on his back, Earl forms an uneasy alliance with Dotty Lupo, an angry young math major searching for a tape used to blackmail her sister. Together they race to uncover a repository of secrets that could reshape the American political landscape. Earl has a secret weapon- he was a high school PE teacher for more than thirty years.
That's the wrong old man to mess with.
FALL 2025
Colson Ferro’s Fewkhead is the beginning of an epic mystery series that takes Earl Fewks and Dotty Lupo around the globe. He’s old, he’s mean, he stayed in shape. She’s mean, she’s young, and she always has a plan. Their friendship is uncommon and often hilarious. They ride again with…
The Panama Hammer
Colson Ferro works in film and television. His collection of essays on the history and soul of dive bars in Muncie, Indiana, and assorted Midwestern cities will be completed just before the end of his lifespan.
The devil on deacon row
C.C. Lovette
When the charismatic crime lord Haskell Cantor dies at the end of his long conflict with Sticky Head Petey White, the upper ranks of both organizations are left headless and decimated. Haskell’s chauffeur and confidante, the beautiful Polish immigrant Kazimiera Symborska, takes the reigns of Haskell’s empire, with Maudeen Green, the manager of Haskell’s Camden, New Jersey nightclub, as her right hand. Haskell had judges, he had truces, he had a network, and without him, everyone who worked for him either dies on the street or dies behind bars. The secret of the crime lord’s untimely death is safe until Haskell’s goddaughter Baby Trujillo goes missing in nearby Philadelphia, possibly the victim of a dormant serial killer known as The Devil On Deacon Row. While investigating, Kaz and Maudeen discover a conspiracy far darker than anything they could have imagined. If they're to survive, they’ll have to be better than Haskell ever was. And Haskell Cantor was a genius.
C.C. Lovette’s gritty noir, first in a trilogy, will be out this Fall.
ROYAL SPRAY
Emery Kennedy
Inheriting a shopping cart repair business is a family test for Kevin Billings. He’s a rudderless trust fund cliché and he knows it. He’s to learn the merits of work at small town grocery stores along America’s loneliest highways. His three friends see something different. Lewis Fisher, a natural grifter, senses opportunity. Fleets of carts wait down forgettable roads for new wheels, new coats of the latest gloss, and the strange men who bring them back to life for one more year. Those same men can bring all kinds of things. The bitterly failed poet Danny Wilcox sees an express train to madness that might bring him closer to the root of the ‘word’. Only Gary, the DJ in the group, sees the venture for what it probably is- a front. Four young men, one terrible scam, and a road trip that just might last for the rest of their lives.
A road noir with all the wrong turns.
WILDBOY AND THE CERAMIC THREE
Terry Gerson
Harvey Lee is a Wildboy, one of the ancient humans born before the Reformation. He roams the reconditioned expanse of Texas Park, a ranger of sorts, searching for the dangerous ghosts of lost institutions. The Ceramic Three is retro band making old fashioned music and touring the expanse looking for inspiration. They’re in the right place at the right time when the ever-fragile future is imperiled.
