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New Release​

Gris Gris
Gumbo

Crayton Breaux makes minimum wage clerking in a French Quarter voodoo shop catering to tourists. It’s enough to pay the rent and keep him in beer and partying because, in New Orleans, every day is Fat Tuesday, brah!

As for the “voodoo”? Well, the shop, with its skull-and-candles altar and clouds of incense, definitely spooks the visitors in from Iowa or Delaware. They clutch their go-cup hurricanes and nervously joke about sticking pins in dolls or picking up a gris-gris bag full of REVENGE ON YOUR ENEMY! powder.

Crayton thinks it’s hilarious. More than a few of these idiots think this stuff’s real …

He won’t be laughing long.

Gris-Gris Gumbo book cover

About Rick

Well, I was born in the wagon of a traveling show and my mother used to dance for the money they’d throw. My dad? Well, he’d do whatever he could. He’d —

WAIT! That’s a Cher song!

OK, here are three things about my life that I find amusing:

1. I once helped carry the casket of a friend and one of the other pallbearers was the actor who played Newman on Seinfeld.

2. I was in a band in the late 1980s called Safety in Numbers and we appeared on Star Search, which was sort of the predecessor of shows like American Idol and America’s Got Talent. We lost to a band called The Zippers. It was at that moment we knew that Fate hated us.

3. My Mom thought I would become a mortician because, when I was young and already fascinated by horror movies, I’d cry when I watched the Saturday night creature features – but only at the end when the monsters died.

Other than that, I grew up in Texas and live in Connecticut with my very funny and pretty wife Eileen. We are joined by the latest in our succession of excellent rescue dogs, Virgil and Mabel, who were nobly preceded by Puppy Brown, Moosie and Gumbo. I spent 14 years as a rock musician (see Safety in Numbers, above) and have subsequently worked for The Day newspaper as an arts/dining writer and columnist since the Carter Administration.

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