Another long-unavailable story I wrote years ago is now up for free at Wattpad. "Maiden's Prayer" was my first story featuring Terrence Bledsoe and/or Ella Dodge (the second story is available in Crime Factory: First Shift ). I placed my Hollywood fix-it man story years ago (long before Ray Donovan ) at the now-defunct Darkness Before the Dawn . Read it for free here .
Giri/Haji ("duty"/"shame") is simply spectacular. It's wonderfully shot, extremely well acted, amazingly well written, full of representation, and moves between characters and cultures with an ease you seldom see. The pacing is great--things happen and when things don't happen it still manages to be fulfilling! There's great action when there needs to be. And drama--meaningful drama--aplenty. And lots of feels. Easily one of the best things I've seen on Netflix and not just because it's the yakuza series I always wanted but feared they'd screw it up if they tried to do it.
I suppose it’s fitting that Netflix would release a docu-series about Maury Terry’s: the Son of Sam was part of global Satanic cult nonsense. One has only to look at Q-Anon to see the Satanic Panic has never really gone away. And it’s not surprising that it wouldn’t. The Satanic Panic is such a perfect product of American culture and societal disfunction. This ridiculous notion of a vast network of the diabolic committing atrocities was birthed in the disillusioned 70s from the ritualistic crimes sensationalized by the changing face of journalism and super-charged with a big dose of the occult thanks to a popular culture drunk on the success of The Exorcist . But the Panic truly came of age during Reagan’s 80's as societal trust plummeted, greed was labeled as good, and countless opportunists came out of the woodwork to shill made-up memoirs of life in Satanic cults, peddle their services as “occult crime experts”, or send innocent people to jail thanks to “recovered memories.”