The Handyman

Stephen King calls him "A master of the macabre!"

The Handyman: A New Novel
by Bentley Little

About the Book:
Daniel Martin has never forgotten his childhood encounters with Frank Watkins, the man who built his family a summer home out of cardboard and plywood.

Frank's gaze was oddly confusing, as if he was attempting to discern the proper way to behave because he didn't know how to respond in a human manner, almost like an alien trying to pretend to be human.

Since Frank obviously wasn't an alien, Daniel thought maybe the man was crazy.

In the end, young Daniel would learn the terrifying truth about Frank Watkins...

And as an adult, Daniel is about to discover there are more of them out there...

Published as a trade hardcover edition:
• Printed on acid-free paper
• Bound in cloth with colored head and tail bands
• Featuring hot foil stamping on the front boards and spine
• Wrapped in a full-color dust jacket
• Retail price just $25

Little wraps a fascinating supernatural mystery in a suffocating cocoon of horror. Daniel Martin is a typical Southern California kid in the 1980s, until his parents decide to purchase a vacation home in rural Arizona. Their new house will be constructed from a prefab kit—and the strange handyman across the street offers to build it for a low price. Little do Daniel and his innocent family realize that everyone who comes into contact with weird and evil Frank Watkins meets malevolence sooner or later. After Frank moves away, the corpse of a child is found in the basement of his old home. Shortly thereafter, Daniel's brother dies gruesomely. And that's just the beginning. As the story unfolds, readers see that the evil Frank causes has popped up across the country and over decades. With each taut chapter, Little skillfully reels in the reader, climaxing in an oddly believable paranormal finale. Little's horrifying tale will entice even readers who are not fans of the genre, and stay with them for a long time to come.
— Publishers Weekly

And you thought your contractor was bad? Little, one of the most dependable tanks in horror fiction, follows such delightful jobs-from-hell shockers as The Mailman (1991) and The Consultant (2015) with a story of a simple handyman named Frank Watkins. Or Watson. Or Wilton. Or Wilson. Depends on where he pops up, see. Daniel Martin was just a little kid when Frank built a vacation house for the Martin family—a house that had dead dogs buried under it and suffered a structural collapse that killed Daniel's brother. Years later, Daniel, now in real estate, happens across other so-called "Frank houses," structures of shoddy build that always manage to kill their occupants. Teaming up with a paranormal TV show called Ghost Pursuers (Little cleverly credits Frank's supernatural activity as causing the rise of such shows), Daniel hits the road to track down this hammer-swinging, cement-pouring, child-killing fix-it man. Though Little appears to lose interest during the mumbo-jumbo-filled final battle, this is far from a fixer upper. It's a finished mansion full of sick, playful rooms for you to explore.
— Daniel Kraus in Booklist

Bentley Little was born in Arizona a month after his mother attended the world premiere of Psycho. He received his BA in Communications and MA in English and Comparative Literature at California State University Fullerton. His Master's thesis was the novel The Revelation, which was later published and won the Bram Stoker Award in 1991. Since then, he has written many more novels and his work has been translated into seven different languages. Several of his novels have been optioned for film. His work has appeared in many issues of Cemetery Dance magazine, including Cemetery Dance #64, which was the Bentley Little Special Issue and featured an original interview with him and two of his brand new short stories.

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