In the spring of 1998, I began to feel a bit burned out on the job. It was affecting my writing. In short, I was uninspired and in a rut. I needed something to renew my enthusiasm and rekindle my creative fire. So I signed up to audit a course in creative writing at USC. One of the stories written for that class, “House of Horrors,” was the seed that grew into this short-story collection. The instructor, Robert Lamb, had started a small press to publish works by his students, and he encouraged me to continue writing. Several years and many stories later, he and I compiled Lonesome Pines for his Red Letter Press. One of the stories, “The Lamp,” was a South Carolina Fiction Project winner in 2007. Set in a fictional town in North Carolina between I-95 and the Atlantic Ocean, these stories are filled with colorful characters, outcasts, and misfits who find themselves in one strange predicament after another.