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Gothic #1
Florida Gothic
Stuck in a twilight world between life and death...
A hit-and-run driver leaves Ernesto Martinez to die by a Miami canal. Then an alligator comes along to finish the job.
Being dead gives Ernesto plenty of time to think. He thinks about his wife, taken from him too soon by illness. He thinks about his daughter, the victim of a drunk driver. He thinks about his death as he watches his body slowly decompose.
Most of all, he thinks about injustice.
The meth head ex-con living in the Everglades. The judge enjoying retirement on the Gulf Coast. The son of a Colombian drug kingpin partying in South Beach. These men care nothing for the pain they've caused. But they'll soon know what it is to feel pain.
Set against the sweltering bug-infested backdrop of South Florida, Florida Gothic weaves a darkly unnerving and visceral tale of sex, drugs, crime and vengeance.
The debut novella in the "Gothic" series from Mitzi Szereto.
Published by Strange Brew Press (an imprint of Midnight Rain Publishing)
A hit-and-run driver leaves Ernesto Martinez to die by a Miami canal. Then an alligator comes along to finish the job.
Being dead gives Ernesto plenty of time to think. He thinks about his wife, taken from him too soon by illness. He thinks about his daughter, the victim of a drunk driver. He thinks about his death as he watches his body slowly decompose.
Most of all, he thinks about injustice.
The meth head ex-con living in the Everglades. The judge enjoying retirement on the Gulf Coast. The son of a Colombian drug kingpin partying in South Beach. These men care nothing for the pain they've caused. But they'll soon know what it is to feel pain.
Set against the sweltering bug-infested backdrop of South Florida, Florida Gothic weaves a darkly unnerving and visceral tale of sex, drugs, crime and vengeance.
The debut novella in the "Gothic" series from Mitzi Szereto.
Published by Strange Brew Press (an imprint of Midnight Rain Publishing)
- GenresHorror
151 pages, Kindle Edition
Published June 1, 2017
1 person is currently reading
64 people want to read
About the author
Mitzi Szereto
69 books146 followersOFFICIAL ACCOUNT
Mitzi Szereto (mitziszereto.com) is an American-British author, anthology editor, and short story writer whose books encompass multiple genres, most recently in true crime, including her latest release Women Who Murder: An International Collection of Deadly True Crime Tales as well as her popular series The Best New True Crime Stories. Her work has been translated into several languages. A contribution in her anthology Getting Even: Revenge Stories received the Crime Writers’ Association Short Story Dagger “Highly Commended.” She has the added distinction of being the editor of the first anthology of erotic fiction to include a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Mitzi has appeared internationally on radio and television and at major literature festivals, and has taught creative writing around the world, including universities in the UK. In addition to having produced and presented the London-based web TV channel Mitzi TV, she portrays herself in the pseudo-documentary British film, Lint: The Movie. Follow her on social media @mitziszereto.
Mitzi Szereto (mitziszereto.com) is an American-British author, anthology editor, and short story writer whose books encompass multiple genres, most recently in true crime, including her latest release Women Who Murder: An International Collection of Deadly True Crime Tales as well as her popular series The Best New True Crime Stories. Her work has been translated into several languages. A contribution in her anthology Getting Even: Revenge Stories received the Crime Writers’ Association Short Story Dagger “Highly Commended.” She has the added distinction of being the editor of the first anthology of erotic fiction to include a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Mitzi has appeared internationally on radio and television and at major literature festivals, and has taught creative writing around the world, including universities in the UK. In addition to having produced and presented the London-based web TV channel Mitzi TV, she portrays herself in the pseudo-documentary British film, Lint: The Movie. Follow her on social media @mitziszereto.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
September 27, 2017
When I opened this up, I wanted to love it. The style is thick and full of vivid, realistic detail; the character we initially start on is pretty interesting; the setup is all right: an old man with nothing much to live for gets killed in a Florida hit-and-run accident involving a crocodile and comes back as a zombie.
So far so good.
Then the other characters come in. They aren't just the lowest of the low. They are the lowest of the low at great length and in vivid detail. Again, the writing is really good here. But the author keeps reminding us that we're not supposed to like these other characters, because they aren't characters but caricatures. They're unlikable characters, fair enough, but the author can't stop reminding us of that--and it booted me out of the story. The characters don't just do what they do, they spend pages trying to justify themselves doing it while the author winks at the reader about how terrible the characters are.
If it hadn't been done with such depth and vividness, I wouldn't have minded; your mileage may vary. If you enjoy watching people you constantly are reminded to hate putting themselves in a train headed for a brick wall, then this may be the book for you. But I wanted the author to go big or go home - either fully invest in their mundane evil and stop winking at the readers, or make them so over the top that it felt like a story about the little guys finding a loophole to screw over the truly big bads of the world.
A near miss for me, but one that made me want to put the book down every time it wasn't the zombie's POV.
So far so good.
Then the other characters come in. They aren't just the lowest of the low. They are the lowest of the low at great length and in vivid detail. Again, the writing is really good here. But the author keeps reminding us that we're not supposed to like these other characters, because they aren't characters but caricatures. They're unlikable characters, fair enough, but the author can't stop reminding us of that--and it booted me out of the story. The characters don't just do what they do, they spend pages trying to justify themselves doing it while the author winks at the reader about how terrible the characters are.
If it hadn't been done with such depth and vividness, I wouldn't have minded; your mileage may vary. If you enjoy watching people you constantly are reminded to hate putting themselves in a train headed for a brick wall, then this may be the book for you. But I wanted the author to go big or go home - either fully invest in their mundane evil and stop winking at the readers, or make them so over the top that it felt like a story about the little guys finding a loophole to screw over the truly big bads of the world.
A near miss for me, but one that made me want to put the book down every time it wasn't the zombie's POV.
August 27, 2017
“Ernesto Calixta Martinez is comfortable with routines.”
This is the opening sentence of a gory novel about disappointment and supernatural revenge in Miami, Florida, where old Cuban men reminisce about their homeland before the Communist revolution, where dope dealers make money from the needs of their customers, and where retired professionals hope to rekindle their youth. And alligators prowl for meat.
As in most horror novels, everyday routine is the background into which something shocking arrives without warning. Ernesto’s routines ease his loneliness, the result of the tragedies in his life.
Ernesto (an honest man, as his name suggests) left Cuba with his wife, Esperanza (literally his hope) many years before. Unable to have more than one child, they doted on their daughter Lourdes, who grew up, married, and was childless in turn. Esperanza died, Lourdes was widowed, and then she was killed by a stoned driver who ignored a red traffic light. Ernesto is left with no family except a brother in Cuba who is loyal to the Castro regime.
As a family man without a family, Ernesto tries to find meaning in his life. He fights a losing battle against insects in his little house, and feels betrayed by the “American justice” which granted his daughter’s killer a light sentence and then failed to notify Ernesto that the killer was out on parole. Ernesto doesn’t tell his neighbors about his daughter’s death, as though pretending she is still alive somewhere else could lessen his grief.
The public library is a place where Ernesto can find information via the internet. He learns the whereabouts of Cody Wilson, his daughter’s killer, and the name of Walter Frederick Thompson, the retired judge who passed the sentence.
If this novel were a conventional thriller, the powerless man, Ernesto, would probably look for a gun and seek revenge. Instead, he is struck down in the same way his daughter was, by a speeding driver in an altered state of consciousness.
The driver who strikes Ernesto speeds away without a backward glance. Whether Ernesto could have survived his injuries is unclear, but before he can crawl off the road, an alligator climbs out of the nearby canal and starts shredding him.
That’s when the dark miracle happens. Ernesto becomes a one-armed, almost one-legged zombie with superhuman strength, although his body continues to decompose.
Later on, there is a suggestion that Papa Legba, the trickster god of Haitian voodoo, was seen in the area at the time. No one really knows how Ernesto “survives” while dead, but apparently some force in the universe wanted to give him a second chance.
The third-person viewpoint allows for some memorable scenes starring characters other than Ernesto. There is Pedro Salazar, son of a Colombian drug lord with a local empire of his own, who rolls on in his expensive car after running over Ernesto. Pedro has his own baggage, and his own logical fate. The more he has, the less it satisfies him.
The Spanish numbering of the nineteen chapters in the novel (“Uno,” “Dos,” “Tres,” etc.) is one indication that the narrative belongs to the major Latino characters, Ernesto and Pedro, and that while one keeps rising in power, the other steadily loses it.
Then there is the retired judge, whose love of routine seems parallel to Ernesto’s: “Every day’s pretty much the same for Walter Frederick Thompson, and that’s the way he likes it.” Except that he hates being surrounded by “old fogies,” with whom he can’t identify, and he itches to get away from his aging wife so he can have sex with a hot young woman, the kind he can’t avoid seeing in their bikinis on the beach.
This is a novel of what happens to men who fail to gain insight or empathy in a place that seems like a tropical paradise from a distance, but feels more like hell to those who live there. The tightly-woven plot shows that every act has consequences.
Both hit-and-run deaths are caused by carelessness; bad things happen when neither the driver nor the pedestrian pay enough attention to where they are going. In some cases, the process of cause-and-effect is only visible to the omniscient narrator, and the reader.
Judge Thompson has never told his wife that he was robbed by a young woman he picked up at a party while his wife was out of town. The judge’s awareness of his own “mistake” makes him sympathetic to Cody Wilson in the matter of his “accidental” killing of a woman he didn’t know. The judge’s conservative values are parallel to Ernesto’s, but the Cuban’s faith in America is unsupported by reality, while the judge is able to create his own outcomes, up to a point. Cody Wilson’s whiteness was undoubtedly a factor in the judge’s mercy, but Ernesto never gets a break while he is alive.
As repulsive as Ernesto’s rotting body appears, he forms a kind of peace pact with the “lower” life forms he used to kill. He becomes a host for insects:
“The clicking of palmetto bug wings creates a strange kind of language. Ernesto hears them communicating, telling each other they’re in a safe zone, that the crazy old Cubano has finally decided to leave them alone instead of trying to murder them with poison.”
The saying “Que en paz descanse” (“rest in peace”), often said of the dead and abbreviated (QPD) on tombstones in Latino cemeteries, eventually applies to Ernesto when he is literally disintegrating. It seems unlikely to apply to any of the characters who die when they are least prepared for it.
The versatile, prolific Mitzi Szereto, probably best known for her erotic stories, anthologies and workshops, has tackled a different genre and shown herself at home in it. This contemporary tragedy is likely to become a classic of horror literature, and it is only the first of a planned “gothic” series. The second novel, New Mexico Gothic, is scheduled to be released soon. A reader can only hope Szereto plans to explore local creepiness in each of the fifty states.
---------------
This is the opening sentence of a gory novel about disappointment and supernatural revenge in Miami, Florida, where old Cuban men reminisce about their homeland before the Communist revolution, where dope dealers make money from the needs of their customers, and where retired professionals hope to rekindle their youth. And alligators prowl for meat.
As in most horror novels, everyday routine is the background into which something shocking arrives without warning. Ernesto’s routines ease his loneliness, the result of the tragedies in his life.
Ernesto (an honest man, as his name suggests) left Cuba with his wife, Esperanza (literally his hope) many years before. Unable to have more than one child, they doted on their daughter Lourdes, who grew up, married, and was childless in turn. Esperanza died, Lourdes was widowed, and then she was killed by a stoned driver who ignored a red traffic light. Ernesto is left with no family except a brother in Cuba who is loyal to the Castro regime.
As a family man without a family, Ernesto tries to find meaning in his life. He fights a losing battle against insects in his little house, and feels betrayed by the “American justice” which granted his daughter’s killer a light sentence and then failed to notify Ernesto that the killer was out on parole. Ernesto doesn’t tell his neighbors about his daughter’s death, as though pretending she is still alive somewhere else could lessen his grief.
The public library is a place where Ernesto can find information via the internet. He learns the whereabouts of Cody Wilson, his daughter’s killer, and the name of Walter Frederick Thompson, the retired judge who passed the sentence.
If this novel were a conventional thriller, the powerless man, Ernesto, would probably look for a gun and seek revenge. Instead, he is struck down in the same way his daughter was, by a speeding driver in an altered state of consciousness.
The driver who strikes Ernesto speeds away without a backward glance. Whether Ernesto could have survived his injuries is unclear, but before he can crawl off the road, an alligator climbs out of the nearby canal and starts shredding him.
That’s when the dark miracle happens. Ernesto becomes a one-armed, almost one-legged zombie with superhuman strength, although his body continues to decompose.
Later on, there is a suggestion that Papa Legba, the trickster god of Haitian voodoo, was seen in the area at the time. No one really knows how Ernesto “survives” while dead, but apparently some force in the universe wanted to give him a second chance.
The third-person viewpoint allows for some memorable scenes starring characters other than Ernesto. There is Pedro Salazar, son of a Colombian drug lord with a local empire of his own, who rolls on in his expensive car after running over Ernesto. Pedro has his own baggage, and his own logical fate. The more he has, the less it satisfies him.
The Spanish numbering of the nineteen chapters in the novel (“Uno,” “Dos,” “Tres,” etc.) is one indication that the narrative belongs to the major Latino characters, Ernesto and Pedro, and that while one keeps rising in power, the other steadily loses it.
Then there is the retired judge, whose love of routine seems parallel to Ernesto’s: “Every day’s pretty much the same for Walter Frederick Thompson, and that’s the way he likes it.” Except that he hates being surrounded by “old fogies,” with whom he can’t identify, and he itches to get away from his aging wife so he can have sex with a hot young woman, the kind he can’t avoid seeing in their bikinis on the beach.
This is a novel of what happens to men who fail to gain insight or empathy in a place that seems like a tropical paradise from a distance, but feels more like hell to those who live there. The tightly-woven plot shows that every act has consequences.
Both hit-and-run deaths are caused by carelessness; bad things happen when neither the driver nor the pedestrian pay enough attention to where they are going. In some cases, the process of cause-and-effect is only visible to the omniscient narrator, and the reader.
Judge Thompson has never told his wife that he was robbed by a young woman he picked up at a party while his wife was out of town. The judge’s awareness of his own “mistake” makes him sympathetic to Cody Wilson in the matter of his “accidental” killing of a woman he didn’t know. The judge’s conservative values are parallel to Ernesto’s, but the Cuban’s faith in America is unsupported by reality, while the judge is able to create his own outcomes, up to a point. Cody Wilson’s whiteness was undoubtedly a factor in the judge’s mercy, but Ernesto never gets a break while he is alive.
As repulsive as Ernesto’s rotting body appears, he forms a kind of peace pact with the “lower” life forms he used to kill. He becomes a host for insects:
“The clicking of palmetto bug wings creates a strange kind of language. Ernesto hears them communicating, telling each other they’re in a safe zone, that the crazy old Cubano has finally decided to leave them alone instead of trying to murder them with poison.”
The saying “Que en paz descanse” (“rest in peace”), often said of the dead and abbreviated (QPD) on tombstones in Latino cemeteries, eventually applies to Ernesto when he is literally disintegrating. It seems unlikely to apply to any of the characters who die when they are least prepared for it.
The versatile, prolific Mitzi Szereto, probably best known for her erotic stories, anthologies and workshops, has tackled a different genre and shown herself at home in it. This contemporary tragedy is likely to become a classic of horror literature, and it is only the first of a planned “gothic” series. The second novel, New Mexico Gothic, is scheduled to be released soon. A reader can only hope Szereto plans to explore local creepiness in each of the fifty states.
---------------
September 4, 2017
Look out readers! Florida Gothic will shock you to your core. Mitzi Szereto carefully guides us through the very nasty underbelly of the darkest of Miami’s dark side in a gritty tale where love is scarce and violence rules 24/7. It takes a highly skilled, intelligent writer with impeccable control of her craft to keep me glued to the page, and I was. This first in a series plunges headlong into the sinister minds of high-and low-life criminals, and the soul of the tormented, preyed-upon protagonist who is hell-bent on revenge. Recommended? Absolutely!
February 13, 2018
Raw and Primal
Enter the dark side, where the author drags the reader so gracefully into this journey of visiting the sinister. Szereto is a master of writing the darkness and graphic without being campy or too over dramatic or gory. It is the perfect blend of sinister versus horror. This story grabs the reader and won't let go. This story is very graphic and it takes one with a strong stomach to not look away, but reading it, you can't look away, and the details need to be part of this story. The characters had a great depth and fit within the premise of the story. Highly recommended horror story.
Enter the dark side, where the author drags the reader so gracefully into this journey of visiting the sinister. Szereto is a master of writing the darkness and graphic without being campy or too over dramatic or gory. It is the perfect blend of sinister versus horror. This story grabs the reader and won't let go. This story is very graphic and it takes one with a strong stomach to not look away, but reading it, you can't look away, and the details need to be part of this story. The characters had a great depth and fit within the premise of the story. Highly recommended horror story.
September 14, 2017
Graphic Horror...Can you take it?
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August 6, 2017
Top-notch horror from a top-notch author! Florida Gothic by Mitzi Szereto is dark, gritty, gory and creepy as hell. Definitely not your typical horror fare, which is definitely a good thing! Szereto sets the bar high for this debut in her new "Gothic" series. I can hardly wait to see what she comes up with for her next book!
September 3, 2022
Florida Gothic is a dark little tale, a quiet, intimate, vintage slice of horror. Even when it's at its bloodiest, it's like watching a grainy slasher flick with the sound turned down low, with just the shadows flickering about you. Having only experienced her erotic side, this was something of a change of pace for me, but Mitzi Szereto delivers.
Ernesto enjoys his little routines, his rituals. They make sense of his day, give him a purpose. But death puts an end to that.
Though it doesn’t put an end to Ernesto.
After Ernesto dies, he begins to like other things. Dark things.
Like the best horror stories, Florida Gothic is dark, creepy and violent, but it is also quirky and kind of smug. It is an altogether deceptive story, one that slithers along with the languid pacing of an alligator in the Florida heat, but which bites just as hard and just as fast. With its different points-of-view, it almost gleefully spoils the fate of its villains, letting us in on their moment of demise, before switching back to Ernesto and letting us anticipate what we already know is coming.
Similarly, while the initial deaths come quickly, unannounced and unexpected, Szereto draws out the fear and the dread of Ernesto's final victim. This is a story of dark, damaged people, of mortal men with human failings, and of one man for whom death is only an opportunity. For anybody who has ever dreamed of vengeance, ever wanted to use their dying breaths to repay an unforgivable cruelty, this is the perfect read. More than anything else, this is a book of consequences, a story where justice is rarely served, but where fate catches up. In fact, the final twist is one of the best scenes in the book, even if we know it is coming.
Part Poe, part Serling, and part King, Florida Gothic is a dark, powerful, entirely satisfying read.
Originally reviewed at Beauty in Ruins
Ernesto enjoys his little routines, his rituals. They make sense of his day, give him a purpose. But death puts an end to that.
Though it doesn’t put an end to Ernesto.
After Ernesto dies, he begins to like other things. Dark things.
Like the best horror stories, Florida Gothic is dark, creepy and violent, but it is also quirky and kind of smug. It is an altogether deceptive story, one that slithers along with the languid pacing of an alligator in the Florida heat, but which bites just as hard and just as fast. With its different points-of-view, it almost gleefully spoils the fate of its villains, letting us in on their moment of demise, before switching back to Ernesto and letting us anticipate what we already know is coming.
Similarly, while the initial deaths come quickly, unannounced and unexpected, Szereto draws out the fear and the dread of Ernesto's final victim. This is a story of dark, damaged people, of mortal men with human failings, and of one man for whom death is only an opportunity. For anybody who has ever dreamed of vengeance, ever wanted to use their dying breaths to repay an unforgivable cruelty, this is the perfect read. More than anything else, this is a book of consequences, a story where justice is rarely served, but where fate catches up. In fact, the final twist is one of the best scenes in the book, even if we know it is coming.
Part Poe, part Serling, and part King, Florida Gothic is a dark, powerful, entirely satisfying read.
Originally reviewed at Beauty in Ruins
Disclaimer: I received a complimentary ARC of this title from the author in exchange for review consideration. This does not in any way affect the honesty or sincerity of my review.
April 12, 2018
I wasn't sure what to make of this book when I first began reading. The tense and style used isn't one I would usually opt to read, and there was, what one could argue is, more tell than show…BUT, having said that, there's so much woven into this tale that it works. I came away having thoroughly enjoyed it and the style was part of that. In short, it worked for the story the author wanted to tell, making it a novel rich with facts and flavours of the Florida setting and cultural mix. The chapters hop from character to character interlinking their individual stories in an entertaining and darkly humorous way (I caught myself laughing). I could picture this as a film. If you like a fun-filled retributive horror this fits the bill.
September 1, 2017
eggcellent.
October 28, 2017
Great writing!
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews