Sleeping Dogs

A new Mike Stone PI story, except now he's no longer in Hell

Mike Stone, my doomed protagonist in Everybody Lies in Hell and four later PI in Hell short stories that precede the action in the aforementioned horror/fantasy/mystery PI novel, is featured in a new story in the most recent issue of Black Cat Weekly (#248), except in Sleeping Dogs, Mike’s alive and working as a PI in 1990s Brooklyn, New York.

While there’s a natural follow-up novel that could be written to Everybody Lies in Hell, and while I think that the Mike Stone PI in Hell stories that I later wrote are all distinct, I felt that any further PI in Hell stories would tread on already existing ground and would feel repetitive. Also, the rules in Hell that Mike operates in that were established in the novel are complex, and I didn’t feel like coming up with yet another way to explain them in another story, and so I decided to let Mike rest in Hell, so to speak, but it turns out I wasn’t done with him. An editor for a still unannounced anthology asked me for a PI story that would need to take place in the 1990s, and since Everybody Lies in Hell had Mike Stone working as a PI in Brooklyn before he was killed in the late 90s, I decided to use Stone as my PI, and I liked the way that story came out, so I later decided to write Sleeping Dogs. And since I liked how this one came out, there will probably be more Mike Stone Brooklyn PI stories.

Black Cat Weekly with Sleeping Dogs can be bought at: Black Cat Weekly #248