Selective Listening

TWENTY TALES OF WHEN THE MACABRE & HUMANITY CLASH Massive spiders attack a hotel. A ghost cat that's part of a paranormal revenge scheme. Two gunslingers refuse to duel. A haunted marine base flightline. A witch barista. A rattlesnake bite that creates multiverses. A fortune teller who is always right and always wrong. A dead, newlywed werewolf in a drainpipe. A mermaid whose captor is using her tail for meat ...
What do they all have in common? Music inspired the stories in this collection. Some songs are mainstream; others are obscure. Regardless of whether you know the songs, these tales will make you laugh, gasp, tremble, and fill you with childlike nostalgia, while you pull the bedsheets to your eyes to check once more that your closet door isn't still creaking open by itself ...
List of artists who I adapted for these stories: Moby, Jethro Tull, Porcupine Tree, Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, Nine Inch Nails, The The, Kenny Rogers, Stanford Prison Experiment, The Police, Quicksand, Peter Gabriel, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Tori Amos, And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead, The Who, Live, Panic at the Disco, Queen, R.E.M., & Neil Diamond.

Brian Paone, a Massachusetts native displaced to Virginia, has been a published author since 2007. Brian has, thus far, released nine books: "Dreams Are Unfinished Thoughts"-a memoir about befriending a drug-addicted rock star; "Welcome to Parkview"-a macabre cerebral-horror novel; "Yours Truly, 2095"-a time-travel adventure novel; the "Moonlight City Drive" trilogy-a supernatural crime-noir series; "The Post-War Dream"-a historical-fiction military novel; "Packet Man"-an urban thriller with a dash of fantasy; and "Selective Listening"-a multi-genre collection of twenty short stories.Brian is a police detective in Maryland and has worked in law enforcement since 2002. He is the father to four children, a self-proclaimed rollercoaster junkie, a New England Patriots fanatic, and his favorite color is burnt orange. And, in 2019, he fulfilled his lifelong dream of becoming the proud owner of a 1981 DeLorean!