Launch party makes the news

Here is a cut from the Portland Tribune piece on OryCon by Anne Marie DiStefano:

Ghosts live, and Elvis, too
I follow my friends upstairs to a party in honor of a newly released book called "Servant of the Manthycore." A third-floor hallway of the hotel is choked with pirates and wenches.

A giant poster of a manticore (a mythical creature with a lion's body and human head) points the way. We enter a small, crowded room. It's almost totally dark inside, but lazer-bright pinpricks of green light are spinning on the ceiling, and behind a makeshift bar, a woman is handing out bottles of Henry's beer.

Inadvertently, I stand in front of the projector, and someone points out my shadow on the ceiling, calling it the constellation of the girl with the beer. "Look," I say, "this only happens once every 10,000 years," and I tip back the bottle.

"Is that the Big Sipper or the Little Sipper?" someone else calls out.

Then the lights come on.

The author of "Servant of the Manthycore" is Michael Ehart, a one-time journalist and resident of University Place, Wash.

Writing for a newspaper was good training for the kind of genre work he does now, Ehart tells me. He learned to write straight through to the end and then let it go, he says.

We all head over to a small conference room for Ehart's midnight reading of his new short story, "Six Zombies Doing That Mick Jagger Strut." It's a fast-paced, witty tale about a down-on-his-luck ghostbuster and the spirit of Elvis Presley.

Pop culture has invaded the supernatural realm just as thoroughly as fictional beings have invaded the Marriott.

annemariedistefano@portlandtribune.com

The entire article is here.

The story mentioned is available in the Damned in Dixie anthology here.