Hellbender and The Shining Hotel

Hellbender is now live on Amazon, Kobo, and Barnes & Noble. I’m very happy to say early reviews are generally very positive.

In other news, we visited my sister in Denver this past weekend, and we took a trip out to Estes Park to see the Stanley Hotel. I know, it’s cliche, but The Shining is a great novel, and I wanted to see the “Overlook Hotel” that inspired the book.

The place is very cool, although the inside looks nothing like the movie, which was not filmed inside the Stanley, and the greenery out front looks like neither the book nor the flick (no topiary animals, and the recently added hedge-maze is a waist-high novelty). I would highly encourage the hotel to get some topiary animals.

Still, it was cool to stroll around and take it all in. While sitting in the little downstairs coffee bar drinking my Redrum Latte, I spied with my little eye (not to be confused with my larger eye), alone in the corner a gentleman who was a dead-ringer for serial killer Dennis Rader, aka BTK. Now, lest you chalk that up to a novelist’s over-active imagination, I pulled up pictures of Rader on my intellectual communication device and showed Rader to my wife and to my sister, who didn’t know who he is, and she agreed–the gentleman at the Stanley could have been his clone. So, that was a cool little creepy thing that happened.

If you get out to Estes, I encourage you to check out the hotel. But of course you will; I’m sure most people who visit Estes are making the pilgrimage, or are at least curious enough to check it out. You’ll want to purchase hotel tour tickets in advance of your visit, though. We did not, so we did not get a tour (although a tour guide did slam a door in my my face when I was apparently looking in a place I hadn’t paid to see (lol- they left the door open- not me!).