Books by Michael McCarty

Lake Livingston: August, 1961.Mark Gaitlin is 15, the son of one of the wealthiest men in Texas, and on the most boring summer vacation of his life. His days are filled with the pomp and circumstance of country club life, while his nights are a parade of one embarrassment after another at the hands of giggling teenage girls.But the piney woods above Lake Livingston are dark at night, and hold many secrets for an impressionable youngster on the cusp of becoming a man. And one night, after skinny dipping in the lake with a mysterious local girl, Mark Gaitlin's life takes a crazy turn into the fire and brimstone religion of backwoods snake handlers and abandoned villages haunted by old family secrets. If he can survive the snakes and the ghosts and his own family's dark history, he just might make it out of the woods alive.And something else...he just might become a man.

"Michael McCarty's 'A Little Help from My Fiends' truly shines. His collection of short stories is a lovingly created, watered with blood and harvested at the peak of ripeness kind of work. The approach to the collection is so fresh that -- were it a steak -- you would note still a bit of warmth and even a faint pulse. You see, each story in this collection is co-authored with another excellent storyteller. Mark McLaughlin, Terrie Leigh Relf and Dave Miller, to name a few, make appearances. Each short story is prefaced with a few words that identify the co-author, point to an interesting tidbit of the tale's creation, and never fail to show McCarty lauding the co-author while remaining modestly in the background." -- Sylvia Cochran

This volume assembled a devil's brew of horror, from prolific author Mike McCarty and a wide-ranging crew of collaborators, including Mark McLaughlin, P.D. Cacek, Jeffrey Thomas, Charlee Jacob, Cristopher Hennessey-DeRose, Sandy DeLuca, Teri A. Jacobs, R.L. Fox, Cindy Hulting, and Michael Romkey.