I get that gatekeeping is wrong, but…
I’ve kept my pseudonym pretty quiet in the past, tried to remain a wholly separate entity as far as possible, but he’s crossed a line, and I feel I have no choice but to out him for the absolute dastardly villain that he is.
Like most things that I end up spending way too much time on, the author, Chase Tatham was born out of a joke, a vehicle with which to deliver a ridiculous premise based on the phrase ‘bear witness’. What is a bear was the only witness to a crime? What would that story look like? And what if it was a Lee Child-esque action thriller featuring a vigilante with hands and feet which could be registered as deadly weapons?
I gave over my mind, temporarily, to my pseudonym, and the novel he created from this premise is, frankly, ridiculous. It features a lot of helicopters and a surprising about of nudity from the star, Bryan Knight – a man who has rules for everything, from waking up to hand-to-hand combat (and that’s just in the first couple of chapters). If you’re interested in Bear Witness (what is wrong with you?) you can pick that up here.
While I intended this to be a one-off, Tatham had other ideas, sneaking in a James Bond-style final page BRYAN KNIGHT WILL RETURN IN THE RIGHT TO BEAR ARMS. Now, I’ve not been particularly productive since the release of the final Guy Fawkes: Demon Hunter book. (Two puzzle books, several short stories, and an Etsy store containing dozens of prints and a range of Halloween bunting might tell a different story, but are we even alive if we’re not telling ourselves off for not being more productive?)
So I allowed Chase Tatham to take over the writing part of my mind once more, thinking he’d hack out some convoluted sequel to Bear Witness which would probably be a rip off of The Rock with some unnecessary padding lifted from some other action franchise.
Only he didn’t. The bastard only went and wrote a horror novella.
It Came From the Pothole is a creature feature. An ode to B-movies. Social commentary about the state of our roads and the potential damage of letting a creature from the underworld through a breach between our world and theirs.
But it’s not what he was supposed to write. It doesn’t fit in with his oeuvre (that’s right, action thriller spoofs featuring bears is an oeuvre).
So what did the daft bastard do? He only went an came up with a pseudonym of his own, a pseudonym so dumb, so lazy, that you’d have thought it dribbled from the pen of the sloppiest hack there is. It’s C. Spook Tatham. He’s just taken his name, and stuck ‘Spook’ in the middle. Then, because it was too long, he’s truncated his first name to an initial. I despair at his antics, I really do.
And if stealing my genre and coming up with a lazy pseudonym wasn’t bad enough, you won’t believe what else he did. He wrote to me and asked me to write the foreword. Can you imagine? From where did he even get the stamp.
You’d think, given my ire about the whole situation I might have said no, but after I read the novella, how could I?
So It Came From the Pothole will emerge into the world on the 24th October. And while it doesn’t bear my name, I wish Chase Tatham, and his alias C. Spook Tatham the very best with this endeavour.
Maybe he’ll give me a little peace now, and let me get on with some work of my own.