THE UNFORTUNATES

About the Book

Imagine you worked at a company in which every other week, people you knew were dying. But not just dying: being gruesomely murdered. That is the watercooler topic of the month for workers at Showbiz Studios, once the legendary home to the Hollywood silent movie era.

Meet Christian McCorkle, a thirty year-old man-child obsessed with living each day at work as if it were a TV show. Christian only wants a happy workplace for himself and the clerks he supervises in the studio's mail department.

Unfortunately, a serial killer, known as the Whistler, has found a plethora of victims on the massive studio lot-executing each one in a grisly manner. If that weren't enough, a secret cult holds meetings on the premises; ghosts walk the corridors; and Christian's least favorite employee, the always-tardy Mu-Chin Chin, may be a spy for the evil head of Human Resources.

It's up to Christian and his employees, who call themselves The Unfortunates, to tackle these sinister goings-on before one of their own falls victim to one of the various maniacs who threaten them. Their efforts might even earn these mailroom clerks long overdue raises if they can survive.

About the Author

Raised in a small coal town in West Virginia, C.A. Smythe turned to his imagination and writing to take him away from a content but uneventful reality. He attended Virginia Tech, majoring in Communications. In his senior year, fate led him to Los Angeles for an internship at the daytime drama The Young and the Restless, though his favorite soap opera is Passions.

Smythe worked for a number of years at a television network, which thankfully, was not quite as wicked as the network portrayed in this book.

The author is currently developing a stage musical and is collaborating on a steamy project for television. He resides in the beautiful town of Burbank, California, where he lives with his ventriloquist dummy, Willie Talk; his sock monkey, Ollie; and his teddy bear, Aloysius, who play themselves in this book. He is single and is accepting applications for future companionship.