Buried by Tom Baker

I discovered this morning, in between taking calls, that someone thought enough of an old novel I wrote, Buried (2007) to actually turn it into an audiobook version. I don't think it's AI either. The second half has a guy that alternates accents--I have yet to come across an AI voice simulator that does that.

Most people would be hopping mad about this, feeling as if they have been "ripped off." This book is loved by some at least, as it's ended up in some strange places--including an old collection of Ebooks of gothic horror and ghost stories from the Victorian Era. The person who assembled that collection thought Buried was actually nearly a hundred years old. It was written between 2006-2007. Again, I did my job well, even though few have ever read it.

A few reviews prove that some have and loved it.

The book is in public domain and is also known as 'Till Death Do Us Part by "Borg Schroeder." I put the book in public domain, although you used to be able to also buy a pocket version back in the days before my first account at the POD company was TOS'd for unspecified reasons. I don't know what very rare copies of that book may be going for these days, haven't checked, but I reckon it may be a pretty penny. I used to send them out as gifts in my mailings (I started sending packages of mail art, recordings, and books back in the day, having started doing it when I was on the noise scene forums with kids who were trading out their cassette tapes.)

Buried is inspired by the case of Otto Carl Tanzler, a very strange man from Key West, Florida who lived in the early half of the Twentieth Century. Otto was a distinctive character with a van dyke beard who looked like someone from an old movie. He wrote a largely fictional autobiography for a pulp fiction magazine, after he was caught living with the deceased body of Elena de Hoyos, a young Cuban immigrant woman he was infatuated with. He had exhumed her body from the tomb he had constructed for her, living with the corpse, sleeping with it in his bed, and reconstructing it in wax and paraffin until he was discovered by Elena's sister and her husband, and whisked to jail.

He was never charged, as the statute of limitations had already run out on his crime, and so was released. He wrote his "Confessions" and died, supposedly, clutching a porcelain mask of Elena, going to join her, in his mind perhaps, on the other side.

The strange, undying devotion and deathless love of Tanzler for his "Darling Elena" inspired me to write a horror novel wherein Elena, become "Rose," rises from her death, returned as a vampiric entity that Tanzler must kill for to satisfy. It seemed the next logical step.

The novel itself seems ambiguous, as the events could all simply be happening in Tanzler's mind. One reviewer, years ago, called it a "descent int madness."

I have personally done an audiobook of the "Secret Diary of Count von Cosel," although I skipped one chapter for various reasons. You can access those chapters at this link:

The Confessions of Count Von Cosel

To download Buried, you can go to Obooko or Internet Archive. You can follow this link:

To listen to the audiobook of Buried, from Echoes from the Dark @EchoesFromTheDark-p4c, go to the playlist below.

The novel Buried is, I would argue, a buried classic. Like many of the other books I have written it--to quote a spirit I once had an automatic writing session with--"Does not permit itself to be read." Let's put the lie to the ghost, eh? Otherwise, Buried may unfortunately remain, a classic that remains to be unearthed.

Author's website:

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Read my book: Silent Scream! Nosferatu, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Metropolis, and Edison's Frankenstein--Four Novels by C. Augustine.

Ebook

Print book

Read my book: Theater of the Worm: Essays on Poe, Lovecraft, Bierce, and the Machinery of Dread by Tom Baker