If you have a taste for slambang satire that plays games with the names of dead celebrities from James Dean to Barbara Stanwyck and a hearse driver with the marvelous name of Coffin Joe, Michael P. Naughton's Deathryde: Rebel without a Corpse (Gilded Hearse Press, $12.95, 183 pages), is your kind of book. It's the story of a gang of criminal undertakers engaged in a caper known as "Harold and Maude" involving a group of Hollywood funeral homes and an ancient but unforgotten mafia… Continue

In Stephen King’s book, On Writing – A Memoir of the Craft, he talks about filtering out distractions and creating your own universe while writing. King said he likes to work to loud music -- hard-rock stuff like AC/DC, Guns ‘n Roses and Metallica and how music is another way of “shutting the door.” Quentin Tarantino also spoke about creating the atmosphere – how he’ll write for a while and then find the appropriate song to keep him in the mood. For me, music has always been part… Continue

Question: You said you wrote this story originally as a script before HBO’s Six Feet Under and pitched the idea around Hollywood. Explain what happened and why you shelved the story?



Michael P. Naughton: Call it Jungian synchronicity, collective unconsciousness or just plain old coincidence— or maybe not. I was working on the general story and wrote up a treatment for Deathryde and also read Jessica Mitford’s classic The American Way of Death Revisited. I was working with Jorge… Continue