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My latest horror novel, Outrageous Fortune, is not the first time that my adopted hometown of San Diego, California has been used as a setting for one of my fictions, but it is the most extensive and all the other projects were short stories.

Part of the reason I used San Diego for the novel is because the principal location, the Kensington Theater is a fictionalized version of my favorite theater, the beloved Ken Cinema.

I came to San Diego in 1981 when I was assigned by the US Navy to the USS Bella Wood (LHA-3). At that time this city had a ton of movie theaters, from grand palaces like the Loma out in the Sport Arena area to the grindhouses downtown that played the most interesting exploitive fare 24 hours a day. However, the Ken, a part of the Landmark Chain, was quite special.

The theater was a revival house, played older films in double features that changed on a daily basis and arthouse and foreign films that played longer engagements. From its worn, hard seating, I watched a number of films that became favorites. A double feature of It Came from Outer Space and The Creature From the Black Lagoon, both presented in their original 3-D format. It was at the Ken that I was exposed to David Lynch with a double feature of Little Shop of Horrors(the non-musical original) with Eraserhead.

Such a beloved and treasured space made a natural setting for my story of cursed nitrate film and the ghost trapped in that celluloid.

In the forty-four years that I have lived in this city I have resided in a number of apartments and houses, nearly always with dear friends as roommates. Nearly every apartment that appears in Outrageous Fortune as a character’s home is located in a complex where I lived. These places are vivid in my memory as is Balboa Park — its trails, museums, and eateries — another aspect of my decades living in San Diego.

During 1984, the novel’s setting, I was already a performing member of the shadow cast that participated in the Rocky Horror Picture Show experience at the Ken every Saturday and Sunday. It was among that group of oddballs and misfits that I found a real community where I fitted in with them like they had been a family from which I had merely been absent and not one newly discovered. Once, at a breakfast/brunch with many of them, someone commented to Goldie that I was shy and she exclaimed quite loudly “Bob is shy?” I am quite shy around people I do not know and also in situations that are not a good fit for my personality, the people of the Rocky crowd were not that at all.

So, amid the death, the ghosts, the vengeance, and cultists murdering to advance their twisted and selfish goal, Outrageous Fortune contains love for cinema, for San Diego, and for the Ken Cinema.