MEAN BUSINESS ON NORTH GANSON STREET

A literary crime novel that ranks up there with the likes of Richard Price and Cormac McCarthy, but with the kind of plotting that compares to the best filmmaking traditions. The protagonist is a badass cop with a moral compass who is sent to a desolate town in Missouri where cops keep getting killed, one by one.

Florida-born New Yorker S. Craig Zahler worked for many years as a cinematographer and a catering chef, while playing heavy metal and creating some strange theater pieces. His debut western novel, A Congregation of Jackals was nominated for both the Peacemaker and the Spur awards, and his western screenplay, The Brigands of Rattleborge, garnered him a three-picture deal at Warner Brothers, topped the prestigious Black List and is now moving forward with Park Chan Wook (Old Boy) attached to direct, while Michael Mann (Heat & Collateral) develops his nasty crime script, The Big Stone Grid at Sony Pictures. In 2011, a horror movie that he wrote in college called, Asylum Blackout (aka The Incident) was made and picked up by IFC Films after a couple of people fainted at its Toronto premiere. His post-earth science fiction screenplay Conflicts of the Last Progenitors has been optioned by Andrew Adamson (Shrek & Narnia).
In May 2013, his second western novel, Wraiths of the Broken Land, was published by Raw Dog Screaming Press in both trade paperback and hard back editions, and later this year, his science fiction book Corpus Chrome, Inc. will also be released under the Dog Star imprint. His modern day martial arts crime drama Downtown Dragons was recently purchased by Starz network and now in development there. Currently, he is navigating preproduction on his directorial debut—a horror western that he wrote called, Bone Tomahawk, which will star Kurt Russell, Jennifer Carpenter, and Timothy Olyphant.
A drummer, lyricist and songwriter, Zahler continues to make music, and is now finishing his third album of doomy epic metal with his band Realmbuilder, which signed to I Hate Records of Sweden, after his foray in black metal with the project Charnel Valley (whose two albums were released by Paragon Records).