Certainly one of the strangest writing projects I’ve ever done, this was a work-for-hire novel adapted from a computer game, which was pretty hot stuff (no pun intended) at the time, since it was voiced by Dennis Hopper and Grace Jones, among others. The game, which I played through before I started, was goofy fun, and dealt with a near future world in which society is divided along religious lines, and Hell is an actual place to which malefactors are condemned for going against the established religious state. All of it, of course, is virtual, and our heroes are two government agents who get on the bad side of the church and have to bring down the system to save themselves.

It was as nutty a story as it sounds, and I got a lot of help in the cybervein from my son Colin, who, though still in high school, was a staff writer for PC Gamer magazine. I namechecked him and a number of his friends in the book, and dedicated it to him as well. The folks at Prima and Take 2, the game company, were a joy to work with, and the book was featured in an article in Entertainment Weekly.

I was contracted to do another novel based on a horror board game called Atmosfear — clever, eh? — that included a videotape (talk about obsolete media…), and was supposed to take the world by storm. It didn’t, and the novel was never written, other than an unpublished 60 page novella. Believe me, it was just as well…