 Are you an indigenous storyteller who likes to delve into the dark? Consider submitting a story to the open call for Never Whistle at Night, an anthology of indigenous dark fiction from Penguin Random House, edited by Shane Hawke and Ted Van Alst. If they accept your story, you'll be published alongside writers such as Owl Going Back, Rebecca Roanhorse, Shiri Dimaline, Tom Orange, and others. Find all submission details at ShaneHawk.com forward slash submit or neverwhistleatnight.com But I didn't want to put that on hold to do other stuff. Also, I needed content in the worst way, but I made it! I made it! And today, we are talking about a new release that should be out today. If the link isn't down there in the doobly-doo for you to go check it out when this video goes live, it will be shortly because, like I said, it comes out today. Now, this is not a Halloween themed story. In fact, it's more of a not really Thanksgiving, but Christmas themed kind of deal. And it is called Black Friday and it is written by my friend Todd Kiesling. I'm making you very aware of that upfront that Todd is a friend of mine, a very, very good friend of mine. We talk on a daily basis. He formats all my, I pay him, but he formats all of my books. He does. He's even done art cover artwork for one of my limited editions. Fantastic dude. He mentioned that he was going to come out with this on Halloween. I was like, I want an early copy please. And thank you. And he was nice enough to send me one. Now, I have been, I have fanboyed over Todd's work and I have given him a critical review. I fanboyed over Devil's Creek and I gave him a critical review for the three reconciliations. The last reconciliations. I can't remember the title. It's a riff on the yellow king, the king in yellow, something like that, which I'm not wholly familiar with. So maybe that was another reason why it did not go off for me, whatever. But today we're talking about his novelette Black Friday in which a retail worker has to deal with zombies. That's pretty much, that's the setup. That's the pitch. And that's the home run for me. I enjoyed this for the subtext, the characters. I like the characters, the dread. I knew something bad. You know, in a short story like this, you know, something bad is going to happen and not everybody's going to make it, that kind of thing. Maybe no one is going to make it. But I enjoyed the subtext here more than maybe the actual storyline. Storyline is about a Doug, a retail worker who is in love with and in a relationship with Jenna, who is also a retail worker. Doug gets her a ring and is going to propose to her on Black Friday. Or maybe it's the, he buys the ring during a Black Friday sale and he's going to propose some other time. But anyways, that's a very important part of the storyline. That's why the ring is on the cover. Another thing is, if you grab this story, get yourself a barcode reader also. Each chapter break, or it's not really chapters, it's more of a page break. Each page break has a barcode and you're going to want to scan those barcodes. Last, I would say the character of Thomas, I enjoyed the character. Of course, this is one of those stories where you know what's going to happen. I will say that. I'm giving it 4.5 stars for that. I'm going to round it up to five on Goodreads because I love the story for what it was. I like isolation horror. I like horror with subtext. I'm not a huge zombie fan, but the Santa Claus part. The Santa Claus part is in the actual description for the novelette, so don't add me if it's in the description. I like the Santa Claus bit. I just like the overall story because it didn't really focus on the zombies. You had other things there. Very heavy notes of Don of the Dead, Romero's Don of the Dead, even Snyder's Don of the Dead. These zombies were a little more dangerous than just the shambling corpses for Romero. It was more like a Zack Snyder Don of the Dead kind of vibe. Not that they were running everywhere like a World War Z movie, not the book. The black blood, that kind of thing. It was all very reminiscent of Don of the Dead, and there's the consumerism culture. One of my favorite lines is, I believe it's Thomas says, we worship a day of shopping. That really struck me. These aren't ideas that I've not seen before, these are ideas I have seen before, but I like Todd's delivery and I like the way that he did it. I really like the story, blew through it, burned through it. I think you'll have a lot of fun with it, especially if you like subtext in your fiction. There's some overt subtext, there's some lighter subtext. I really enjoyed digging deeper and that's what I like with Todd's work is he always gives you something below the surface. He gives you the surface level fun and then he gives you something below the surface and I believe any good read does that. So yeah, I'm giving Black Friday my recommendation. I suggest you guys go out and read it, not only because Todd is my friend, but because I honestly enjoyed the piece. In fact, if you want to see me be critical of Todd, I'll link my review. Todd's probably watching this cringing, but I'll link my review to the final reconciliation. I remembered it. I'm so sorry, Todd, so I remembered it finally at the end, the final reconciliation. At least I hope that is. Now I'm judging everything I say, but yeah, go out and try out this short story. I will link to it down there in the doobly-doo. If you want to come back afterwards and tell me what you thought of it, I would love to hear from you, but that's it. The final episode of 31 Days of Halloween, I am done. I'm still going to be shooting videos. I'm not sure if it's going to be daily, but we're done for the month. My subs are through the roof. I got over 500 new subs this month. I say over because they don't really tabulate by the day. It's a couple days off. My revenue tripled. My engagement did drop in half, so y'all get down there in the comments and leave me comments and I'll talk to you. Ask questions. Just have chat. All that kind of stuff. If you're just like, this book is great. I'd probably just go in and heart your stuff and move along, but engage with me. I'm here to talk to you guys. I'm not here to make money, so the tripling of the income does not balance the lack of engagement for me. I need engagement. I like engagement, so engage with me, please. But until next time, I have an E, you have an U. This has been the finale of 31 Days of Halloween. I'm so happy this is done. I'm so happy I made it. I'll talk to you guys later. Bye-bye.