I am Mars Knight, a sixty-seven-year-old, retired widower living in the high desert of Belen, New Mexico with four dogs who keep me as a semi-domesticated pet. I always wanted to write, and penned my first story about a pet dinosaur when I was six. Now in retirement, I finally have the time to write.
I appreciate the gracious opportunity offered by the Author’s Lounge to promote my sci-fi/ horror novella ‘Peddler of Death’.My story takes place in old New Mexico Territory, circa the 1880s, where an irascible peddler named Jethro Kayne discovers nine black, thumb-sized, alien creatures and their downed spacecraft..Kayne takes home the injured bug-like things, and feeds them. He calls the ravenous monsters ‘clickets’, because they communicate by snapping their jaws together, and Kayne teaches them Morse code. Kayne is a small man who wants to be a big man, and he figures that the clcikets are his ticket to power. Life has been unfair to Jethro kayne, and he plans to right that wrong with his army of killer clickets. People will pay for mistreating him, the whole human race is to blame for his misery.
The clickets have an insatiable appetite and they reproduce by orders of magnitude, and General Kayne leads the army of little monsters to a miner’s camp, a town of ruffians and a ranch, where the clickets strip every living creature of flesh.If you hear them, it’s already too late.The thriving community of Coyote Gulch is on the future menu.
Hunger has no morals, whether it be for food or power; the clickets eat, and Kayne gains confidence and strength. Nothing can stop him, and his rapacious army of little black monsters; nothing. The future is his, and the world will be his plaything, once trillions of clickets roam the Earth. Kayne must lead them to food, so he doesn’t become a meal himself. It’s a tricky business, but Kayne knows tricks.
The mysterious and unknowable forces of Life and Death draw together a renegade Navajo, a mute boy, an aimless drifter, a drunkard and Jethro Kayne’s courageous daughter, and they all converge on the town of Coyote Gulch where a battle will be fought; a showdown. The five strangers are caught up in the forthcoming struggle between the Life Bringer and Death, and while they might feel as if they act under their own volition, there are other powers at work, beyond their ken.
Everything is going Kayne’s way, and the world will soon be his to rule with fear and force, but his daughter wants to have the last word, and he never reckoned on the whiskey..
Peddler of Death is my first attempt at penning a straight story, sans humor, and I think I’ve mostly succeeded in that goal.I enjoy using old west tropes in my writing, and twisting them into new shapes. Readers of most ages will be entertained I think, and will find a character to identify with.
I used historical locust invasions as inspiration for this tale, but retooled the bugs as carnivorous, black monsters.
My other writing credits include a full length sci-fi thriller novel, ‘Things Could Always Be Worse’ which is set in an alternate universe, on Earth’s sister planet Gaia, and a short story series entitled. ‘Monster Snatchers Inc’ , which features nine, original monsters and a crew of three men, one woman and a big German Shepherd, who hunt them down and try to capture them alive for a family theme park. It’s a fun-filled sci-fi/ horror adventure series.
I’ve written Fairy Tales, science fiction, horror, ghost stories, satire and horror stories, but my WIP are a couple of rom-coms.
Learn more at my website, ‘Fun Time’ at marsknight.blog, and at amazon.com/author/marsknight.com
I want to thank Jeniffer and the Author’s Lounge again for this forum.
Mars Knight
