NOW AVAILABLE IN PRINT AND E-BOOK: PW/BookLife Calls BUTCHERTOWN a "Sexy, Non-Stop Thrill Ride!"

One Bad Weekend in One Bad Town . . . .

"A darkly fascinating novel. Butchertown is incendiary”— David Corbett, award-winning author of Mercy of the Night.

Oakland, CA--05/6/2017 Paul Bacon, Jazz-Age ladies’ man and junior city attorney, has come to California for the sunshine and sandy beaches. But all he’s found is loneliness and misery in the fog-choked canyons of San Francisco.

Then one night, Paul meets Molly mysterious, alluring Carver. And before Paul can reign in his passion, she’s lured him across the bay to her hometown of Evansville, promising a romantic escapade in the California promised by the travel brochures.

But Molly’s promise is only camouflage for a dangerous game. Evansville is no paradise but a whirling sewer of sin and pollution; a wilderness of slaughterhouses, factories, and oil refineries; of speakeasies, brothels, and gambling dens even gamier than San Francisco. 

They don't call it "Butchertown" for nothing.

Before he knows it, Paul is caught in the crossfire of a gang war over Butchertown’s teeming vice rackets. As bullets fly and bodies pile up, Paul is forced to take the role of diplomat between the warring factions. If he wants to get out alive, he’d better find a way make peace.

Whatever happens, for Paul Bacon it's going to be one bad weekend in one bad town--Butchertown.

“Burchfield rounds up a great cast of gangsters and gunsels to bat his wide-eyed hero around. For the movie, you'd have to bring Lee Van Cleef back from the dead to do justice to the villainy.”--Don Herron, author of The Literary World of San Francisco and its Environs and The Dashiell Hammett Tour.

Set at the dawn of Prohibition, Butchertown is a colorful, bullet-packed tale of scheming bootleggers, trigger-happy gunmen, devious molls, and a pair of passionate Prohibitionists—one of them an old flame of Paul’s—raging to mold an unwilling world to their unbending ideals.

"A sexy, violent non-stop thrill ride deep into the seedy underbelly of post-World War I San Francisco."-- Reviewer, the BookLife Prize, sponsored by Publishers Weekly.

From the prize-winning pen of the author of Dragon'sArk, Butchertown is also the story of a soft-boiled guy trapped in a hard-boiled world; of a callow but decent man’s efforts to broker a sensible peace out of an insensible situation; and how he comes to wonder if the new world of the twentieth century is one that human beings can live in.

“Thomas Burchfield is an awesomely twisted talent. . . .You won't be able to turn the pages fast enough to see what happens.”

--John-Ivan Palmer, author of Motels of Burning Madness

NOW AVAILABLE IN PRINT-ON-DEMAND AND E-BOOK EDITIONS FROM AMBLER HOUSE!

E-mail amblerhouse@att.net or call (510) 817-4432 for more details!

COVER DESIGN BY CATHI STEVENSON/BOOKCOVER EXPRESS

Our Second Publication! "Whackers" A comic screenplay now available as an e-book at Amazon, B&N, and at Scrib'd!

Photo and design by Ambler House Publishing w/ assistance from Elizabeth Burchfield, Don Herron, Christine Henry and Annette Roux

A talented but cowardly law clerk's blind passion for a beautiful, mysterious attorney puts him on the Fast Track to Hell when a glib n' greedy hit man hires himself to whack the attorney's fiancé—a slapstick nightmare about the awful things that happen when a dream comes true.

In the noble tradition of movie comedies such as the oeuvre of Abbott & Costello and Some Like It Hot; the meditations of Mel Brooks and Richard Lester; the penetrating drama of Airplane! and The Hangover, comes Whackers, an original and unproduced screenplay by Thomas Burchfield, the author of the newly released novel Dragon’s Ark (also published by Ambler House Publishing).

Whackers is the story of Bryce Doolittle--a young man of great talent, but greater cowardice—and his brave retreat from the greatest choices a man can face--between being a Lottery millionaire law clerk, husband to the most beautiful, but exhausting girl in fifty states (plus Puerto Rico) and best buds with happy-go-lucky hit man Jack Studd; or throwing it all away at the risk of becoming the greatest crooner in pop music since Tony Bennett.

Written in the previous century and featuring an imaginary cast of ohhh, let’s see, a couple dozen characters by our guess, Whackers is a work infused with the same warm-hearted nuance and gentle insight that distinguishes such humanist classics as Straw Dogs and Full-Metal Jacket.

Whackers was a sizzling success on its first release in 1996. As one reader at PHA (Powerful Hollywood Agency) said at the time [Ed. note: Insert later when they get back to us].

Whackers is a slapshtick anything-goes meditation on the meaning of success that dashes from the mobbed-up law offices, karaoke bars and FBI-sponsored sex clubs of San Francisco to the gi-normous mega-resorts of Hawaii where even the sharks pay to eat the tourists.

Unhampered by the low budget demanded by reality, uninhibited by the respect for physical law that hampers movies like Transformers, and disdainful of the formatting rules demanded by Hollywood screenplays, Whackers is a rambunctious sex-and-gangsters farce devoid of any cheap moral lessons, aside from “whacking people is a bad idea!”

The critics all agree! (And why not? We paid them to!). Whackers is a comedy screenplay that:

“Unraveled the stitches from my last hernia operation”--Rush Limbaugh

“Left me sexually confused”--Lady Gaga

“Makes Michael Bay look like Werner Herzog! More fun than reading War and Peace in Cyrillic Russian with the lights off!”--Roger Ebert  [Ed. note: Ebert just e-mailed; wants to return money, take back endorsement.]

“More fun than reading architectural drawings! It was like having sugar with my boiled spinach!”—“Is That Not Cool?” News

“A wacky piece of weirdness. A real slapstick, whack-spittin, lickety-splittin rodeo. There's plenty here to work with for comic actors and the right director”—John-Ivan Palmer, author of Motels of Burning Madness [Actual unpaid-for endorsement, writer probably unhinged stalker]


Whackers is now available for download to your e-reader at Amazon, and Scrib'd! Coming soon to the Barnes & Noble Nook, Apple iBookstore and the Reader Store.

Whackers will have you whacking your knees with laughter. Both of them.

Copyright 2011 by Ambler House Publishing

THEY SAY HE DIED IN THE LAND BEYOND THE FOREST . . . BUT THEY WERE WRONG

For a century, Dracula--the Prince of Nightmares, the Superman of Evil--has been quietly casting his dark and impish dreams over the sleeping souls of a High Sierra community who only know him as the eccentric recluse who lives under the forbidding peak known as Dragon’s Ark. But now, facing a modern world intent on washing away the shadows of his enchanting but haunted world, the Vampire King gives life to a dying woman and ensnares her in a grim and ruthless struggle with greedy resort developers over the future of his mountain kingdom.

Dragon’s Ark is a weird, thrilling, and violent tale of supernatural power, intrigue, betrayal, and surreal bloody revenge that follows a fabulous legend’s bizarre and bloodthirsty quest to preserve his life and power against the unforgiving, dreamless light of the 21st century.

"Like a tightrope artist, Thomas Burchfield seems eerily at home walking the fine line between the comfortably familiar and the terrifying. His characters—people you'll recognize, and like—have all blundered much too close to the portal of the unknown. And what resides beyond that portal makes Hell look like Club Med. Dragon's Ark is not a book to read just before nodding off. Unless you're on very good terms with your nightmares"--David Corbett, author of Do They Know I’m Running? www.davidcorbett.com

“Burchfield muscles his way into Stephen King country, like he’s Bram Stoker taking a stab at writing Our Town — the sort of entertainment where you transport Transylvania to the mountainous peaks of California. Population: a large and diverse cast of characters. Then grab a seat, in anticipation of the first droplets of blood”

--Don Herron, author of The Dashiell Hammett Tour Book and Willeford

 

"Thomas Burchfield is a world-class master of suspense and makes a heavy statement on the blood-sucking exploitation that goes on all around us. Dracula not only lives in our world, he is our world. With a language clear and beautiful as a sunset, Burchfield leads you down the path of darkness"-- John Ivan-Palmer, author of Motels of Burning Madness.
 
 

NOW AVAILABLE IN POD FROM AMBLER HOUSE PUBLISHING

AND THROUGH AMAZON

AND

BARNES & NOBLE

Now out in E-book Editions
from Smashwords and Scrib'd!

Copyright 2010 by Thomas Burchfield

Cover by Cathi Stevenson/Bookcover Express