Dylan Dunbar’s “Free Candy” features eight short stories exploring everything from classic battles of good and evil to zombie outbreaks.
Dylan Dunbar is ready to bring some scary good stories to light.
The Detroit guitarist for Jennifer Westwood and the Handsome Devils has released a new book of strange and terrifying short stories called Free Candy: A Horror Story Collection.
It’s the first published work for Dunbar, who discovered a love for writing in 2020 upon tackling an addiction to alcohol.
“I’m now more than three years sober and couldn’t have imagined when I started writing how much of a positive impact it would make in my life—or that I’d be publishing,” he said.
Inspired by The Twilight Zone, Black Mirror, Creepshow, and Tales from the Crypt, Free Candy includes eight intriguing short stories exploring everything from classic battles of good and evil to zombie outbreaks.
Dunbar is celebrating the release of his book on May 9 with a signing at Belle’s Lounge at Valentine Distilling in Ferndale, Michigan. Copies of Free Candy will be available for sale at the event.
For Widetrack’s Ron Tippin, a new type of “mirror” reveals our hidden truths in a vast technological world.
That “mirror” doesn’t reflect our human faces, but instead displays our evolving digital personas on social media and the Interweb through multiple computer, tablet and phone screens. In a sense, we’re residing in a parallel world while interacting with one another in a dream-like state.
“The idea of The Unwakening is how we immerse ourselves in this digital landscape, and it just makes all our worst tendencies come out, and we just wallow in it. All of our wisdom just goes out the window and so does our better nature,” said Ron Tippin, Widetrack’s vocalist, guitarist and drummer.
Ron Tippin explores this haunting concept throughout Widetrack’s new otherworldly 12-track, alt-prog album, The Unwakening, which dropped yesterday. As part of a Waterford father-son duo with 16-year-old bassist-guitarist Zach Tippin, he travels through a dozen digital tales to uncover the conflicting dualities of our personal and online identities.
“I look at a show like ‘Black Mirror,’ and I’ve read the reviews, and people say, ‘Oh, I get it, digital media is bad.’ Well, it’s not that simple. It’s a fantastically great tool, it can connect us in ways it never could, and it’s the stuff of my childhood imagination,” said Ron Tippin, who released the album to coincide with his son’s 16th birthday.
Together, father and son plunge headfirst into a ‘Black Mirror-esque’ realm filled with an angry online influencer who trolls social media, online forums and discussion threads to create a polarizing digital culture. Each haunting track on The Unwakening chronicles the influencer’s rapid rise to power and eventual decline in a fickle virtual universe.
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