Saturday Special LAST WRITES with… author @Paul_Leone

The premise of LAST WRITES is simple. Our guests face their final rest, but before Death claims them they are granted a few parting earthly pleasures, the memories of which will travel with them into the great unknown. What makes these questions appealing and insightful for me is that these are not necessarily our guests favorite things, but those they most want to experience one last time before they shuffle off this mortal coil.

TODAY’S DEPARTING
PAUL LEONE

Welcome to a special Saturday edition of Last Writes as we bid farewell, metaphorically, to speculative fiction author Paul Leone.

I met Paul online, through twitter and patreon, and though a prolific author I had not read any of his work. When he asked for someone to look over a story he was working on, I offered my services. That tale, Demons of the Desert, which took place in Roman occupied Judea in 62 AD, blew me away. It had a very occult detective feel to it and was populated with terrific characters and diabolical entities. It barked right up my proverbial tree and I have been a fan ever since.

If you have a proclivity for urban fantasy and fantastical historical fiction, Paul Leone is your man.You can track him down in the usual places, such as twitter or facebook, or better still, take a gander at his website: http://paul-leone.com

So come, let us lay Paul Leone down for his eternal slumber, but not before we perform his Last Writes:

LAST MEAL:

This one is easy for me – pizza and wings from my local delivery place. Western New York might not be up there with New York or New Haven as far as pizza goes, but we still have some nice spots. And nobody beats WNY chicken wings. I’ve been ordering from the same place since I was in high school, so I’ll go out with their food in my belly.

LAST BOOK:

I’ll go with a predictable and perhaps boring answer as far as authors go – J.R.R. Tolkien. But it’s a bit of a deeper cut, in my defense – the posthumously published The Children of Húrin. It’s a lot darker and more ‘adult’ than The Lord of the Rings, and fleshes out one of the most tragic stories from The Silmarillion into a complete, engaging and thoughtful novel.

LAST MOVIE:

Fantasy Mission Force. It’s an obscure early Jackie Chan movie and absolutely insane from start to finish. The ‘plot’ involves WW2 Japan kidnapping a group of Allied generals (such as Abraham Lincoln) and a rag-tag group of heroes recruited to rescue them. The whole thing is ridiculous, but it becomes sublimely strange in the finale. Even after you see it, you won’t believe it.

LAST SONG:

One I’ve recently discovered, thanks to the cover by Karliene, Roxane Genot and Jan Pouska – the folk song “The House Carpenter.” It’s tells a fantastic (and chilling) story, and hopefully I end up in the fair and high hills instead of the dark and low ones.

FIRST PERSON YOU’D LIKE TO MEET ON THE OTHER SIDE:

My grandfather, who died from Parkinson’s when I was a child, and I never really got to know before he started to succumb to that cruel disease.

It was more than a pleasure to have Paul join us here in the Occult Detective Mortuary. Be sure to visit his author page on AMAZON where you are sure to find something to satiate your desire for a tale well told.

And please remember to tune in this coming Wednesday as we raise up another departed guest on our hypothetical funeral pyre so that they might express their Last Writes. See you then.