A few smartphone apps and knowledge of his way around the internet is all it takes for a college dropout to become the most talked about subject in town. Joker Joker Deuce is a true book of horror because it has all the elements of a psychological thriller but they come straight out of our real lives.
Years ago, I was given a few prompts from a director who knew what he wanted and just needed someone to write it. He wanted technology to be the tools a serial killer uses to fulfill his murderous needs. That was it! That’s all I had to go on to write the screenplay.
Ironically, I had just received a few emails that came perfectly together like a puzzle. The first set was from a dating site trying to tell me that there were girls interested in me. It made me laugh. In my twenties, maybe. But I was a little older than that at the time and the ladies weren’t knocking down my door to get my attention.
The next email though, that’s the one that clicked with me. It was about the latest apps coming to smartphones everywhere. One app, in particular, caught my eye because it was about a party app where a user could find out what’s happening in any city they visit. If you have a mind like mine, those emails spelled the premise of the story. A stalker-level app combined with frivolous emails from members of a dating website who have no idea their profiles are being used to drive user interest? That spells book of horror.
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The psychological thriller that has the dark corners of the internet buzzing, Joker Joker Deuce is available on Amazon now! If you like mind-bending page-turners, you'll love the story about an internet stalker in a small college town who can find anyone anywhere at anytime and his victims have no idea he's coming because there is only one deadly connection between them...
I wrote the story of a serial killer who uses apps to find anyone he wants at any time. It was based on the party app and it used technology I was familiar with. Have you ever gone to a store and later, Facebook is advertising products from that store to you? Have you ever met someone and later, Facebook is suggesting you know that person? Put all this together and you have some real internet stalking material.
If you add the emails from the dating site, you get the formula for a horror story that was optioned in 2019. The director made a trip to Australia and secured the funds for the movie. It was well on its way and I was on top of the world, a world that was quickly kicked out from underneath of me when 2020 came along with its murder hornets, then flooding, and then the coronavirus.
When the world was shut down, my project came to an abrupt end. They promised that it would start back up after the lockdown. But I’m thinking they had seen enough horror by then, they went a different way with their investment dollars.
In the meantime, I wrote The Deeper Dark, an entirely different kind of psychological thriller about a hero who comes home from the war to find out his whole world has moved on without him. Now, he has a new war to fight as a corrupt network is threatening the only person he has left.
When I decided to convert Joker Joker Deuce into a book, something interesting happened. That book of horror grabbed me in a new way. The only reason I can understand is when I wrote the screenplay, it didn’t have all the great detail at first. That was coached out of me by the director who asked for several different rewrites based on feedback from his colleagues and the investors.
The current form of the story was pieced together little by little with each new rewrite. The full story never got a chance to get a hold of me. That was until I wrote the book. It was a deep mind-bending roller coaster that took my emotions to the edge.
Jeph lives alone and works at a sub shop in a small college town. In the house he inherited from his mother after she was viciously murdered, he has a basement where he has a sophisticated computer system. As he regularly browses a forum dedicated to murder victims, he has accounts on Lookbook and Wink, the popular social media and dating site in this fictitious town that could easily be anywhere in America.
Tracy is attending Bridgeport University on scholarship to get away from her abusive ex-boyfriend. She is serious about school and even her party-crazy roommate can’t talk her into putting the books down, not even for a night. But there is something brewing, a budding relationship with a college professor that they have to keep on the down low for more than one reason. It’s no big deal to him that he’s married but she doesn’t know.
Jeph is practically invisible as he meanders through life delivering subs by day and returning to his dark dungeon by night to plug himself back into his isolated internet socialism, an unerring oxymoron. That is all there is to his existence except for a few college students he’s murdered, headlines that have the entire town talking.
Then, he bumps into Tracy. She sees him and she talks to him, something that has never happened before. He’s feeling things he’s never felt. He’s having thoughts he’s never had. He’s imagining an entire life he never dreamed could come true.
She has become his obsession…
A True Book of Horror
