Dead to Writes (April Almighty #1) Read Free

you don’t mind that do you?” he said as she stepped back out, flipping him the bird as she did so.
         “Classy,” he yelled to her, but all he could hear was her laughing as she left.
         He turned to his desk and flipped open his laptop. As he pulled up the browser, he went to the Crashbooks page for “Tunnel of Doom.” The book had only been out for a day or two and it already had some reviews. There were only three or four. One was a five star, the rest were one stars. Herbert was about to add another. He pushed up his glasses and began typing.
         His rule of thumb when leaving a bad review was to at least go into detail. Some of the reviews just said “This book sucks!” That isn’t very helpful to a potential reader. So he made it a point to go through and explain what he liked or didn’t like and why. This was a big reason why his blog was getting more and more traffic.
          He pounded out a review; it came out much longer than he’d expected. He went through and cleaned it up, which was good he did as he found a few typos in the process. Nothing pissed him off more than reading a review of a book which reads something like “This book has horrible grammer.” Crashbooks shouldn’t even publish these, but they do.
         He hit “submit” and his review was off to the Crashbooks queue and would likely be published in the next fifteen or twenty minutes. In the meantime, he copied and pasted the review to post on his blog. Though for the blog version, he’d expand it and add some of his own colorful phrases to liven it up a bit. As he typed away on the blog, he got an email from Crashbooks that the review was now live.
         He clicked onto it just to admire seeing his review live on the Crashbooks site. He’d written dozens of them, but it always felt cool to see a new one go live. After admiring it and re-reading it a few times, he went back to the blog. The final result was a few more paragraphs longer than the Crashbooks version, but that was typical. Gave readers a reason to visit the site instead of just reading it on Crashbooks.
         Once it was finished, he hit “post” and watched it load onto the page. He loved how his homepage was set up. On the background he had hockey masks, blood splatter, and a bloody knife. He used to have it animated so it floated around, but too many complained it slowed down their computers. So he changed it to the still images.
         As he looked it over, there was another email alert. He clicked on the email link and read the message.
         “You’re dead. M.C. McDougal,” it read.
         What the fuck?
         Herbert was furious and typed a reply. He’s had authors comment on his reviews before. Some were plain shitty, but no one ever threatened him.
         “Excuse me? How dare you threaten me? I’m going to forward your message to the police,” Herbert replied.
         He sat back and tried to shake it off, but it was still unsettling. McDougal was a shitty writer, though he had no idea how he’d gotten his email. Just as he opened the blog back up there was a reply.
         “You won’t live long enough to go to the police. I’m going to rip your heart out and shove it so far up your ass, you’ll taste it. M.C. McDougal.”
         That mother fucker! That’s it. Herbert printed the conversation out and put the pages in a folder. He wasn’t sure what the laws were, but this had to be illegal. There was another email before he closed the laptop.
         “I’m going to fuck your girlfriend’s cunt with a blowtorch” it said. Then, there as another.
         “I’m going to cut your dick off and feed it to your ugly girlfriend.”
         “You are going to die, slowly. You will watch as I peel the flesh off your girlfriend, fuck her repeatedly and fuck her ass with a baseball bat. Then I might let you die.”
         Herbert slammed the laptop closed and stood.