The special edition of Claw Heart Mountain has arrived!!! So cool. Thank you to Twisted Retreat for their amazing work and picking Claw Heart for their subscription service.

The publication reading for Claw Heart Mountain was held yesterday in St. Paul, MN, at Artista Bottega. One hell of a fun event-I came in from outside after directing people to the event to find a standing crowd. We needed to put out a dozen extra chairs! Thank you to Angela from Red Balloon Bookshop for selling books at the event and everyone for coming out to support Claw Heart’s launch! Pics (with thanks) by Heather Swanson.

A reminder: if you can review the book on Amazon and/or Goodreads, it’s like you bought ten extra copies to support it

I made a little promo video for it on YouTube. Fair warning, it’s hard to capture the full extent of my charisma on video. (:

Thank you to everyone who has supported the book so far and shown so much enthusiasm for it! I really appreciate it.

“Oppegaard . . . keeps the action moving at the speed of an action thriller or a slasher movie, giving the novel a frenetic pace that makes it a fun read.” —Library Journal

“VERDICT: This propulsive story is made even more terrifying in audio and is a must-add to any collection, perfect for fans of Paul Tremblay and Stephen Graham Jones.” —Library Journal (Audio Book Review)

Another great review has come in for Claw Heart Mountain. Thank you to Horror DNA for the coverage.

“This author was new to me and I enjoyed this novel so much, I immediately downloaded another couple of his books… Overall Claw Heart Mountain is beautifully written and to call it a simple ‘creature feature’ would be a major disservice, as it could be equally enjoyed by thriller and monster novel fans.” -Horror DNA

Read the full review here!

Claw Heart Mountain

David Oppegaard. CamCat, $25.99 (320p) ISBN 978-0-7443-0750-4

Menaces both natural and supernatural turn a planned pleasure trip into a nightmare for the five college students at the center of this macabre thriller from Oppegaard (The Town Built on Sorrow). Nova and her friends Mackenna, Landon, Isaac, and Wyatt are en route to a weekend retreat at a vacation home in Wyoming’s Claw Heart Mountain when they stumble on an overturned transport truck on the highway, abandoned by its driver and containing millions of dollars in cash. Their impulsive decision to take the money puts them in the crosshairs of Bannock, a killer hired by the vaguely defined “Organization” to retrieve the loot. The quintet’s troubles are complicated further by the emergence of “the Wraith,” a legendary mountain monster with an insatiable appetite for human flesh who threatens both the hunted and the hunter. Though the dovetailing of the two pursuits is overkill in spots, Oppegaard milks the caroming confrontations with both monster and assassin for maximum suspense. A few loose threads at the end don’t diminish his tale’s visceral power. Anyone looking for gripping natural horror should check this out. Agent: Dawn Frederick, Red Sofa Literary. (Feb.)

You can read the original post on Publisher’s Weekly website here.

(Originally delivered at my father’s funeral on 11/7/22 )

Hello everyone. Thank you all for coming today to celebrate the life of my father, Alan Oppegaard. My family is grateful for your presence and support here today. Thank you to everyone who has supported both Al and our family during the difficult journey to the end of my father’s life, including the caring staff at North Memorial Hospital. Also, thank you to Lord of Life Church for hosting this memorial and Pastor Peter for officiating—we truly appreciate it.

Alan Oppegaard was a good man. He cared deeply about other people and expressed his love openly and repeatedly. He had a wry, deadpan sense of humor that reminded me of Bill Murray. Al truly was an open book—if he was unhappy with you, he told you so, the issue was dealt with, and soon enough he was joking around again, ready to move on. When I messaged a friend about my father’s passing, he wrote back, “In the brief few times I met him over the years, Al always seemed like a good and kindly midwestern man and also a proud and caring dad,” which I had to agree with.

Born in Madison, Minnesota, a small town within spitting distance of South Dakota, Alan Oppegaard grew up surrounded by farm fields, open skies, and windblown prairie. Honest and hardworking, Al loved his parents and his older brother, Larry. He liked helping people. He liked playing football in high school. He liked reading thrillers and playing guitar. He liked collecting pocketknives and pens and baseball caps. He liked building things. He liked yard work. He liked going on long walks and saying hello to people. He also loved animals, especially his dog, Pechi, who became his closest friend near the end of his life.

Above all, Al loved his kids, grandkids, and boy, he sure loved his wife, Joyce, whom he was married to for the final thirty years of his life. He not only loved Joyce, he also worked with her for 17 years, selling brick and masonry supplies across the Twin Cities. A formidable sales team, when either Dad or Joyce had trouble closing a deal, they called on each other for help, utilizing their different personalities (Dad was a little lower key, while Joyce was, let’s say, more high energy) to connect with a client. Together, Al and Joyce traveled across the world and visited all 50 states, laughing and having a great time, always happiest in each other’s company, happy to work on their house in Maple Grove, go out to bingo or trivia night with their friends, work on Joyce’s Mother Earth charitable recycling project, or spend time at their lake house on the banks of Lake Minnewaska, where they, of course, made many more friends with locals from Starbuck and Glenwood, MN.

All this happiness, of course, made the painful times in Dad’s life more notable. While teaching English in Thailand in the early 1970s, through the Peace Corps, Dad was summoned home to Minnesota by the all-too-soon passing of his beloved mother, Barbara. Before meeting Joyce, he was also married to and eventually divorced from my mother, Kayc, before losing his father a few years later. Then, approximately nine years ago, at the age of 65, Al began exhibiting symptoms of memory loss,

Approximate is a key word here. If our family has learned anything over the past decade, it’s that a world you want to view as black and white actually contains an endless variety of gray tones, some so subtle you don’t even notice them at first. For example, while Dad seemed to possess many of the indicators of Alzheimer’s Disease, he could never officially be diagnosed because he had a pacemaker implanted in his chest, which made it impossible for him to have an MRI. As Dad’s memory loss worsened, his personality also changed, sometimes by imperceptible degrees, sometimes quite obviously. He became a different person, repeating the same stories over and over, often anxious and restless when not actively doing something, like a tiger caged in his own living room. One minute he could be content and happy-go-lucky, another he could be angry and upset. He became Al and not-Al at the same time, a duality that could often be unsettling, hard to understand, and even harder to accept. You’d often want him to be happy, to remember some great time from the past, or simply recall something you’d said fifteen seconds earlier, but that knowledge was now locked away and inaccessible to him. Sometimes he knew your name, sometimes he didn’t. Sometimes Al knew he was sick, and would earnestly thank you for helping him, but most of the time he thought he was doing just fine, thank you.

And, of course, Joyce, as Al’s wife and primary caretaker, bore the brunt of my father’s condition. Her tireless efforts on my father’s behalf, her endurance and patience with his disease, were beyond heroic. All the doctor appointments, all the pill giving, all the mask reminders, all the repetitive explanations (such as explaining what Covid-19 was, over and over and over), all the restless pacing, all the mood swings and agitations, all the errands and visits she couldn’t make alone, Joyce was up for all of it, like a terminator of love. For a handful of times, I watched my father in Maple Grove while she went on work trips, and each time when Joyce returned, I was beyond exhausted and amazed by her endurance and strength, that this was something she lived with day-to-day. Truly, I cannot say enough about what Joyce has gone through and endured, with boundless love, over the past decade. It is astonishing.

Yet even in Al’s final years there were many moments of joy, perhaps even the greatest singular joy of his life. In January of 2018, Al’s former students invited him and our family to Thailand for a reunion after forty-five years. I’d been hearing about Thailand from Dad for my entire life, but even I had yet to understand what a profound event it had been for him. Al’s return to Thailand was extraordinary, like visiting Thailand with a major celebrity, or a revered war hero. Al’s former students obviously respected him so much, and were so grateful for what he’d taught them so many years earlier, that you could see it beaming from their smiles as they hosted us for event after event, meal after meal, tour after tour. One former student, now an older man himself, hugged my father and wept openly when they were reunited. Inspired by all this love and energy, my father, already in the middle stages of dementia, already prone to wandering off and getting lost, was able to remember many of his students and even converse in Thai. In fact, it seemed like Dad hardly stopped smiling the entire time we were in Thailand, especially when we visited an elephant preserve, spending a peaceful afternoon with these enormous, majestic creatures known for their prodigious memories.

I could go on and on about Alski, but I think I’ll end this remembrance with two memories that involve dogs. Sometime around 1988, my father drove down to Lake Crystal, nearly two hours from the Twin Cities, like he did nearly every weekend for several years after the divorce, to pick up my sister and I for the weekend. As we started the drive back to the Cities, he told us our beloved dog, Prancer, had died suddenly in her sleep. When my sister and I began to weep, he pulled over to the side of Highway 60, parked the car, and wept with us.

My second dog related memory is much happier. During our final father-son weekend, just three weeks ago, we went to Weaver Lake Park to walk Pechi and get some fresh air. It was a beautiful autumn day, crisp without being too cold, and the sky was pure blue. We walked up the park’s hillside and into the woods, where fallen leaves already covered the forest floor. Pechi happily burrowed through the leaves, huffing and snorting, while I took pictures with my phone. When the footing grew more uncertain and the trees grew denser, I asked Dad if he wanted to go back to the car. He said no, let’s keep going.

That was Alan Oppegaard. He’d laugh with you, he’d cry with you, he’d explore the world with you. He was up for all of it. He loved being alive—deeply, truly loved it—and chances are, if you’re here today, he loved you, too.

I’m happy to announce we’ve sold my horror novel CLAW HEART MOUNTAIN to CamCat Books. This will be my 6th published novel and will be released (in hardcover, I believe) sometime in spring of 2023.

A big thank you to my friend and new literary agent, Dawn Frederick, at Red Sofa Literary, for facilitating the sale.

I’ve never taken getting published for granted, but after a five year gap in placing my work with a publisher, plus the pandemic, this one is a little extra sweet. There was a large swath of 2020 where I doubted, for the first time in my life, the value of writing fiction at all. It turns out even when the world drastically changes, the need for story, and (for me) the need to create a story, endures after all.

Whoop!

Written for the awesome film review podcast Flahertys On Films!

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Lost in Translation (2003) came out about a year after I graduated from college. I remember seeing it in the Highland Park movie theater in St. Paul with friends (remember when you used to go to a movie theater with friends?) and just sitting there amazed when it was over, letting what I’d seen wash over me. I was in love. In love with Bill Murray and in love with Scarlett Johansson and in love with the gleaming version of Tokyo I’d just witnessed.

It may or may not surprise those who know me that for all my gruff talk and dark jokes that I’m secretly a romantic. By the time I’d seen Lost in Translation I’d already done a fair amount of traveling to places like China and Russia and the Caribbean and Italy and England. I knew what it was like to be both homesick and lovesick while culturally at sea and here was a movie that presented much of what I’d experienced in a funny, beautifully filmed package. And the soundtrack, Jesus, the soundtrack alone buzzed through me.

Listen to the girl

As she takes on half the world

Moving up and so alive

In her honey dripping beehive

-The Jesus and Mary Chain

And, at the heart of all this beauty, was the burgeoning friendship/courtship of Bob Harris and Charlotte, which somehow managed to feel innocent despite both characters being married, which felt both high stakes and low stakes at the same time, which felt like a friendly cosmic joke played by the universe. A relationship that was as much a conversation about existential loneliness and how to deal with it as it was about anything else. How to keep laughing, even when eventually you have to say goodbye and fly back to America, likely to never see a newfound friend again.

Generally I don’t watch a movie more than once or twice. Lost in Translation (along with Wonder Boys and Office Space) is one of my few great comfort movies. I have watched it many, many times. Sometimes I’ve watched it when I was sad and lonely. Sometimes I’ve watched it when I was fresh to new love. At this point, it’s basically a warm comforting film bath I can slip into when I feel the need. Existential loneliness may never totally go away, but it’s always good to have company when you can’t sleep.