“The most bizarre set of tragic events ever to occur…” – Fairmont Times “Gritty… Fascinating.” – Robert Markowitz, New York Times essayist “Alone and bitter, [the killer] fabricated a horrible revenge—on the world and himself.” – The West Virginian “Charlotte Laws is a tsunami.” – Snatch Magazine Devil in the Basement reveals the shocking truth about my family. I learned about the murders, bombings, and devil worship when I visited my ancestors’ hometown of Fairmont, West Virginia. As a former private eye, I investigated what had happened and even ventured into the eerie basement where the satanic rituals had occurred. The story begins in 1928 when thousands of Ku Klux Klan members march through this sleepy town. My great uncle Jal’s passions were ignited that day, as were those of my grandfather Tucker, who changed his Italian name to “sound white” with hopes of escaping poverty and racism, and of becoming a U.S. Senator. Meanwhile, my great-grandmother set up a criminal enterprise in the back barn, and my great aunt was hauled off to an insane asylum before becoming the mistress of a Detroit mobster. But this story is not just about my family. It is also about their creepy neighbor Ernie, who had a ghoulish, life-sized doll. He abused his wives and dabbled in his favorite pastime: evil. He liked evil. He was creative when it came to evil. He was all about evil. Devil in the Basement is a story of love and horror, racism and hope, of Christian piety and satanic ritual. It is a book that shines a light on one of the most ghastly real life incidents in West Virginia history. It is a story you will never forget.

Watch Jeffrey Pugh discuss his new book, Devil's Ink **Our sincere apologies. The web address listed on the back cover flap for following the devil online is incorrect. The web address is devilsinkblog.com, not devilsink.com. Future copies of the book will sport this correction. "What if Satan kept a blog? Blogging is a new form of communication, after all, and evil has always been keen on using new means of propaganda to accomplish its purposes. "Of course, evil is elusive—difficult to discern and more difficult to define. Still, since ancient writers first put the Satan figure into the story of Job, or the serpent into the story of creation, evil has been the subject of much of our greatest literature, from fiction to philosophy. This vast output is testimony to the fact that the mystery of evil perplexes and puzzles us, creates daily struggles for us, and continually scars our existence. If we can imagine intentionality behind all the evil in the world—not hard to do—then the image of Satan blogging to his minions and to all interested parties about the contemporary ways and means of evil is not much of a stretch at all." —From the Preface Jeffrey Pugh writes not about our personal relationship with sin but about the forces and ideas to which humans give their lives, with great material effect on the world. He explores how evil embeds itself structurally in human life and how that can bring us misery and frustration. But he writes in a playful way that makes such reflections accessible to a broad spectrum of readers. Check out the Devil's blog! devilsinkblog.com

James Stark, a.k.a. Sandman Slim, has a new job, but being the new Lucifer in town gives fresh meaning to the word "Hell." Especially when he hears of hideous massacres near a haunted fortress out on Hell's frontier. As far as Stark's concerned, the more dead Hellions, the better, but he still has to prove that no one screws with Sandman Slim. And facing creatures so terrible even Hell does not want them is no cakewalk, even for Lucifer.

Charles Blakey is a young black man whose life is slowly crumbling. His parents are dead, he can't find a job, he drinks too much, and his friends have begun to desert him. Worst of all, he's fallen behind on the mortgage payments for the beautiful home that's belonged to his family for generations. When a stranger - a white man - offers him $50,000 in cash to rent out his basement for the summer, Charles needs the money too badly to say no. He knows that the stranger must want something more than a basement view. Sure enough, he has a very particular - and bizarre - set of requirements, and Charles tries to satisfy him without getting lured into the strangeness. But he sees an opportunity to understand the secrets of the white world, and his summer with a man in his basement turns into a dark game of power and manipulation.

When Tess and Eliot stumble upon an ancient book hidden in a secret tunnel beneath the school library, they accidentally release a devil from his book-bound prison, and he’ll stop at nothing to stay free. He’ll manipulate all the ink in the library books to do his bidding, he’ll murder in the stacks, and he’ll bleed into every inch of Tess’s life until his freedom is permanent. Forced to work together, Tess and Eliot have to find a way to re-trap the devil before he kills everyone they know and love, including, increasingly, each other. And compared to what the devil has in store for them, school stress suddenly doesn’t seem so bad after all.

"Significant change took place when President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger adopted a new strategy.

The title of the book, The Devils Cellar, is the translation of Casillero del Diablo, a fine Chilean wine produced in the central region of the country. The wine (a 2006 Merlot) and the story are inexorably linked, creating a symbiosis of alcohol and words to produce the perfect environment for the reader by stimulating four out of the five human senses. Only the sense of hearing remains untroubled. But did you hear that noise from behind you? Is it the Devil waiting for your soul? The wine weaves its way through the book becoming a witness to the events within each chapter and although it is never opened, the souls of the characters are, and their varying emotions too often spilled. Ultimately, the unopened bottle is used as a murder weapon and the hunt for the perpetrator intertwines with the journey of the bottle from suspect to suspect, thus linking the stories and creating the spine of the novel. The reader experiences, in turn, love, lust, jealousy, murder, suicide, revenge, hatred, greed, theft, intolerance, blackmail, mental illness, drug abuse and religious bigotry, to name but a few, often under the watchful eye of Beelzebub himself. There are more twists and turns in the novel than there are in a corkscrew.