The Bookshelf: Guilford Castle Tour Continued

On the top shelf, reached only by tall ladder, I have a mixture of odds and ends. I've had the cabasa for years, since I sang in bands. It makes an unusual sound, kind of like small gravel on a washboard. You can shake it or twist it or hit dirty peasants in the head with it when performing in rough bars. (click pictures to enlarge)

Behind the cabasa is my midget rhino, captured in the Guilford woods and stuffed by a Guilford company Things You Stuff. It punctured my leg with its tiny horn before I kicked it like a football down into the creek where it landed on a boulder and broke its back.

In front of the rhino is my pyramid. Sitting under a pyramid is supposed to make you healthy. I didn't know they meant you were supposed to sit inside a pyramid. This one finally fell off a lamp on my head point first. I was wearing the black battle helmet next to it at the time so my head was spared another scar and the walnut brain inside my skull didn't move.



On the top shelf on the right are several great books I have used for pleasure reading and reference. The library peasant wipes them down twice a week because I hate fingerprints on my books.





On a lower shelf in the Guilford Castle, from left to right, are several versions of my current books, followed by Hellbound's last book, Death Grip Exit Laughing, containing my story A Gambler, A Dog, And the Demons, and ending with a rare copy of Random Acts of Weirdness. My story Floater, the basis for Bad Night In The Holding Cell, was published in that one. There are four books I've edited for other writers, an unread book by John Connolly, a scifi book by John Cullen, This Shoal In Space, and Black Day by Brian Knight.



I'm ending this tour with a bottle of I am King, a special fragrance created for me by the Queen with her scientists at a local company, Things That Smell. The aroma is hard to describe, kind of like paper money mixed with musk and hemp fiber from hanging ropes.

So, let me quote the Mohawk wearing, chain link through the lips and ears grunger in the old movie Return of the Living Dead...

"This ain't a costume. It's a way of life."