The Dog Days of Youth (Paperback)

Killer Mike and the Blood Slugs - The Days of Youth
(The Blood Slugs #1)

Every killer has a first.

Mike has always known he was different, but when he agrees to watch his friend’s playful dog, Billy, over the end of spring break, he has no idea the way his life is going to change. After using the dog to score free drinks and hit on women, the dam holding back whatever lurks inside of him is finally going to break.

In one world, Mike Fontaine is the frontman for a notorious psychedelic hardcore punk band, but in another, he is a serial killer, and every time the band releases a record in their world, Mike kills in the other.

This is the debut record from Killer Mike and the Blood Slugs.

“Smith fashions a gritty, gut-churning, macabre orchestra of viscera and evil that will leave you gasping for more.”
- K.L. Allister, Author of Absolution and Carnivores

“The prose is jagged, grotesque, and at times, disturbingly poetic. This isn’t horror that entertains. It seeps in. It stains. And once it’s in you… it doesn’t leave.”
- Amanda Ruzsa, Author of I Hope You Have Nightmares About Me

“Only once have I tapped out reading a book, and this was it.”
- Asher Dark, Author of When I Die

Liner Notes: The first time Mike ever killed anything bigger than an insect, it had been a completely spur-of-the-moment event. No planning and no plotting. The act had simply come over him the way a fitful bout of vomiting comes over someone with intense nausea. He had sensed, for most of his conscious life, that there was something jittering inside of him. Something dark and outside the experience of his peers. He had learned to keep that detail to himself, a nausea lurking but held in check, understanding the power of silence. The same way his first kill had come naturally to him, so too did the ability to blend in with everyone else. The same way it came to a chameleon whose skin changed to blend in with the surrounding foliage: unconsciously. Mike was more well-liked than what made sense to him, but he chalked it up to the fact he had learned what to talk about to not creep everyone out but was quiet enough where most people just used him as a blank canvas for whatever they wanted him to be. For all his life, Mike had managed with relative ease to keep a lid on the broiling, black sludge sitting just beneath the surface of his person. But, now, a college student at the tender age of 19, in a room 12 stories above Shikaakwa…