Don't

One brutal dark and stormy night, two reckless teenage couples climb an ancient California redwood and stumble upon a secret world hidden among the crowns of the two-thousand-year-old grove. Enormous mutant insects, reptiles, and ghastly birds of prey have evolved for centuries and centuries in majestic isolation thirty stories above the forest floor, and as violent thunder, hell-driven rain, and nuclear lightning tear at the mysterious redwoods, the old trees work in eerie concert to save their timeless souls. Horror, terror, and dark humor mix savagely in DON'T while a park ranger and a young arboreal botanist struggle heroically to get the human intruders out alive.

So okay this book called “DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT” is completely scary concerning how a lot of stuff we think we know a lot about we actually don’t? My name is Libby Nickels and i’m totally in the book so i know what i’m saying. Actually i’m like one of the six major principle humans that star in it which i’m not bragging about because i’m not exactly proud of what i did to get to be part of it all. So how this entire nightmare started was probably that one day in class when Bucky Brake and Jenna Riley that are friends of mine heard their teacher Mr. Fazio talk about the giant redwoods in Advanced Biology which they take as a senior honors course (both Bucky and Jenna are way smarter than i am) at Beverly Hills High School where i go too. Mr. Fazio was on and on about how just recently some hotshot tree guy climbed up to the top of this super awesome redwood called Sky Knife and what he found up there to his amazement was a whole secret world of weirdly beautiful creepy insects and birds plus freaky lizards crawling around with like three eyes per person! The reason for those creatures even existing Mr. Fazio informed was that the redwoods are like thousands and thousands of years old and so big! Think okay three entire footballs fields stacked end to end tall!!! and the crotches of their gigantic branches have like over the centuries clogged up with decayed leaves and small decomposed dead things that have all basically turned into dirt by now which then when birds crapped seeds onto them sprouted whole entire other trees like oaks and things such as huckleberry bushes that started being home to strange kinds of life that evolved up there and adapted to spending their complete entire time in the treetops kind of going back and forth from one humongous tree to another humongous tree and never coming down because why should they even bother? So anyway Bucky and Jenna got this awesome idea about what a fun challenge it would be for the three of us plus my boyfriend at the time Nathan Huffnagel who was a freshman football star at UCLA to actually take this way illegal hike and sneak out to the tree and climb it ourselves to see these amazing sights personally. i should warn you that the four of us were extreme sports enthusiasts and that we’d already done amazing things like radical hang-gliding and urban swooping which are all like also technically seriously illegal so illegally climbing a giant redwood didn’t seem all that unusual to us? Or dangerous. Except it should’ve? Okay i don’t want to spoil the story for you by telling you too much about what happened to us up there that night during the gigantic thunder and lightning and wind storm or like how many or which ones of us died or got nearly eaten alive because that’s the book’s job to do. Which in my humble opinion it does awesomely and which is why i based my million-dollar screenplay sale on it and how come the publicity people asked me to write this introduction come-on to get you to download the book if you enjoy being scared shitless and also enjoy a good dark laugh at other people’s expenses for just $3.99 then like it and text about it ! Check out okay just one small chunk here -- "Whatever it was, the repulsive thing opened wide its slimy-sticky-shark-fanged mandibles and, dripping exotic saliva, pumped in and out its three-foot scuzzy ant-eater tongue and spread its grotesque bat wings with a sticky thunder flap to expose huge predator-frightening eye patterns on its bright-red swollen thorax. 'Holy fuck,' thought the boy as he took in the disgusting cauliflower-headed horror. It was big as a tiger, twice as savage, and quite unhappy, snapping its gross walking-stick legs in his face." Wow, huh? So now i hope you get the picture, and i also hope you never have to go through anything in real life as i and my friends did in that tree on a dark stormy night. Like i wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. Well, maybe on her i would, but nobody else.

WD RICHTER, author of the frightening and improbably funny sci-fi horror novel DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT, is an Academy-Award-nominated screenwriter whose many credits include INVASION OF THE BODYSNATCHERS, BRUBAKER, DRACULA , SLITHER, ALL NIGHT LONG, BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA, HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS, and a mega-budget aerial thriller he’d rather forget. Mr. Richter also directed and co-produced Earl Mac Rauch’s THE ADVENTURES OF BUCKAROO BANZAI ACROSS THE EIGHT DIMENSION, a cult phenomenon. As a general rule, WD Richter has been unwilling to make public statements or reveal much about his present life on a farm somewhere deep in the New England wilderness, but this interviewer was granted the luxury of limited face time with Mr. Richter over coffee and croissants last fall. What you are about to read has been edited by me, Parker Hurd, interviewer/founder of the blog AMERICAN GRAVEYARD. PARKER HURD: Let’s get right to it, Mr. Richter: Who the hell are you? WD RICHTER: Mostly a product of my environment. I grew up in a small industrial town in the Northeast, all asphalt and concrete, fast cars, faster women, teen gangs and secret adult fraternal societies, a lot of free sex, cross dressing, public nudity, but essentially a good Christian town. I played high-school football, got my nose broken, my knee ruined, my collarbone cracked, a front tooth nerve-damaged, a slight concussion, got married to my high-school sweetie, still am, etcetera, etcetera. But I wanted to escape that world and write about a forest full of the tallest living things on the planet. I decided, for excitement, to throw in a savage storm, weird arboreal beasts much larger and more threatening than anyone in his right mind could imagine, and some kids looking for thrills...one of them higher than the tree he’s climbing. PH: Okay, before we go any further, hit me with the elevator pitch for your novel. WDR: Four teenagers break into a National Park, get lost in a tree and attacked by monsters. PH: And the boldest of the crew -- some might say the craziest -- is a colorful 18-year-old called Bucky Brake who will one day become the 49th President of the United States of America. WDR: Yeah, except Bucky Brake isn't a politician at all in this book. He’s just living in the moment like most kids his age, and all he wants is to destroy a magnificent tree with his chain saw. I think we can all agree that the socially conscious sci-fi/horror/presidential biography is the most exciting under-utilized literary genre of our time. I mean sci-fi novels are a dime a dozen. Horror novels clog both print and digital bookstores. Socially conscious dramas, as Sting learned, close on Saturday night, while presidential biographies gather dust in libraries and used bookshops across the country. But what a challenge to meld all four of those terrifying genres into one sexy, electrifying volume and not birth a monster Herman-Melvillian book in the process. PH: And where Melville used a giant whale, you used a giant tree. Don’t get pissed off at me, but that seems sort of a limiting choice. WDR: Rampaging enormous animal versus stick-in-the-mud plant. Fauna versus flora. He made his choice. I made mine. PH: Who is WD Richter’s target audience? Who does he think will enjoy DON’T? WDR: Anybody out for a good time with a short attention span. It’s got a break-neck narrative drive and some kick-ass white-knuckler set pieces and a collection of fairly disgusting beasts. It starts and then, wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am, it’s over, and the reader can get on with other less exciting things demanding his or her attention. I wanted to explore Nature as a viscous, spiritual, sinister, decaying force. Impenetrably weird. Satanic. Full of madness and maniacs and dark romanticism. All juicy, nasty stuff. Is that it? I have to go see a man about a bull. PH: Thank you so much, WD Richter. And good luck with your book which is hyper good.