Robbie Thomas

---

The Mourning In Hochington series

Posted: 15 August 2020 by Robbie

For starters, I want to express my sympathies to the folks in Beruit. That explosion was quite horrifying. My grandfather was from Lebanon, and I’m 25% Lebanese; the explosion there isn’t a good thing, especially with the city’s poor economic conditions, plus their troubles with Covid-19. I attempted to donate to the Lebanese Red Cross, but it didn’t take. I saw some charity that states they are helping out with Lebanon, and I can donate with my filthy American money, but I want to investigate the charity first. I made mistakes with the Wounded Warrior Project.

My first two books, Mourning In Hochington Volume One and Two, were written under the pen name of Adrian Henderson. Number one was released on 28 November 2009, on the second anniversary of me having a gun pointed at my head on 28 November 2007. Number two was released on Groundhog Day 2012. Mourning In Hochington can be described as a psychological murder mystery and quite brutal, to be exact. I began to write the series back in early 2005 and completed it in the summer of 2009 with some breaks in between. There were times where I stopped writing the manuscripts. There was one time where I stopped for a few months due to a serious tragedy that happened to a friend’s sister and her kids. My friend’s sister stabbed both of her kids to death; it made the local news. At that time, I decided to stop writing the book (or books).

In June 2007, within 24 hours, I lost my job, and my car died at a high traffic intersection, one of my worse fears. I had no car, a part-time job as a dishwasher at my aunt’s restaurant, and went down to Loserville, USA. With the misery running high, I decided to go back to writing the next best New York Bestseller (heh-heh). I promised myself not to have any murders in the book due to stabbings (sadly, I later broke that promise).

I did most of my writing at a now-defunct coffee shop (I can’t remember the name now) in Saint Clair Shores. Handwriting my book and doing most of the typing at home. From 2006-09, I lived in Saint Clair Shores and walked to this coffee shop to write mostly Monday thru Friday, while I worked the weekends at my Aunt’s restraint and making only $150 a week, having to borrow my mom’s car. (God damn, a 25-year-old mentally ill man had to borrow my mom’s car to my part-time job as a dishwasher, what the fuck!! Boy, did I suck!)

The frustration of this shit life I had (some of it was my fault, if not most) cause me to write this book about a small rural town (similar to Armada, Michigan) going through a series of murders that the local police, county sheriffs and later the FBI are having trouble stopping it. The books did not have a sole main character but really four of them.

The Main Characters

Sarah Carneal – A mid-30s redhead who manages the Hochington Bakery, married, and has a son. Living rural life with hardly any troubles. The tragedies in town cause her some mental distress and anger.

Randy Bellham – A school teacher taking a hiatus, lives with his father. Tries to calm the community when tragedies arise.

Clay Rarset – New Zealander, lack-of-fearing Gothic male attempting to live in America and rural Michigan. The tragedies make him question if he should return to his native country for good.

Terrance Shielding – St. Clair County Sheriff’s Lieutenant trying to stop the tragedies while trying to fix the aftermath of a troubling divorce.

The two books had some total brutality on how the murders happened. In the first book, a popular teenage girl gets eaten alive by dogs. Two women who work for the heavily-biased local paper were raped on a bed of nails, a town bully gets his private area blown up by an M-80 and is left to die while watching the documentary Koyainniqasti (did I spelled that write?). In the second book, a couple is initially shot a few times to the point where they can’t move, and one of the bad guys burns the house down with them burning alive. After this, a reward is out for information leading to the bad guy’s arrest or deaths. After that, a crooked cop sends a woman and her boyfriend to play spy on one of the bad guys but sadly gets caught, and both suffer some serious dire consequences.

At the end of it all, and this is a spoiler warning, the two bad guys’ names are John Ackerman and Andrew Oloing. John Ackerman is a career criminal and a very sick man, Mr. Oloing is a young 20s something bitter that his road to the NFL was cut short to a horrific injury he sustained while playing college football. He comes back to work for his father’s restaurant and begins his anger, which leads to him involved with the brutal killings, including the last mention in the previous paragraph.

In early 2004, I had a job at Costco for a month. The department boss I had at the time was a woman in her 30s who was at times condescending and, well, kind of a bitch. Another person who didn’t dig me was a woman in her 50s who was bitter about life. I wasn’t so sure why she was bitter; I’d imagine she got the bad end of a divorce. Anyways, on the day I lost my job, I made a small mistake, and she flipped shit at me. She then told the bosses, including my boss, and said I told her to fuck off (I didn’t). Then I lost my job. Needless to say, a few 50-something divorced women get killed in the Mourning In Hochington books. Truth be told that I do remember this person’s name in question; however, I’ll keep that off here.

So why two books? When I was almost finished with the whole series (two books, really), I found out that the average novel was about 80,000 words. Both MIH books were 290,000 words. I went way too far. So, I decided to split the two, but still, they can be noted as super novels.

2008 was what I would call my recovery year, I had to borrow some money to buy a piece of shit car, and I found work in a plastics factory 20 miles north of me. Slowly paying that money back from the family member I borrowed from. The car was a 1992 Buick Skylark that had many problems. The car overheated quite a lot, and I was making only $350/week; I couldn’t get it to a shop due to the lack of money. If I got stuck in traffic on hot days, that temperature would go up; I would have to pull over and wait an hour.

The car had overheated a couple of times on my way to work, and I would have to pull over and wait. Arriving late a couple of times. The temp agency that gave me the said job would call and ask what the deal was; I said I had car trouble. They weren’t sympathetic about it, and yes, they were right, and they gave me the three strikes, you’re out rule.

I was able to save some money, get a couple of side jobs in the afternoons, and fix that problem with the overheating (and a couple of problems that came up with it). I ended up losing the job just after Labor Day of that year. The company in question was doing a revamp, and I was told that I was needed Tuesday at 3:45 am and I’d be leaving at 2 pm. The person at the temp office had a loud voice. I had the phone away from me, not on speaker to talk to this woman. I thought about quitting due to that 3:45 am start-up time, but there wasn’t much out there that was permanent. I arrive Tuesday morning to see just two cars in the parking lot. I walk into the shop, and I didn’t see a single soul, and it was quiet. After wandering around a little, the supervisor sees me and gives me a dull look and asks, “What the fuck are you doing here?”

At the end of it all, the 2nd shift was 3:45 pm-2 am, 1st shift is 5:45 am-4 pm. I went to Denny’s, had breakfast, called the temp office, and left a foul message on the voicemail. I called the woman who gave me the bad info a bitch and told them to “get their fucking information right.” I had it, and I didn’t give a shit (at the time) about whether I would get fired or not. At 10 am, the same supervisor tells me I’m laid-off and I needed to contact the temp office. I clock out and go to my car, call the office and say, this is Robert Thomas.

Needless to say, they were not happy with my message. They said I should apologize to the loud-voiced woman (I forgot her name), which I refused. Then I was told I was banned from getting any work from that office. Although I was glad I did that, I had a hard time finding work until late October, and I also went $500 in the red. My bank (at the time) was calling me a lot.

While I was losing money and dealing with debt, Mourning In Hochington (later to be the second volume) got much worse in brutality (and the overall writing). I would have two women get murdered brutally by John Ackerman, and Andrew Oloing brutally stabs a man to death in front of his girlfriend. Next for Andrew to shoot the girl in question the leg and insult her family before shooting her in the back of the head. I wasn’t happy as my checking account went in the red, the overdrafts manager of my bank calling me with a pissy tone of voice telling me the riot act.

Good News Ahead

Thankfully, a previous place of employment called me up for temporary work until Xmas day. It was one of the best phone calls I had in my life. Yes, the job was some 20 miles from my house, but it was good work. I got the money to pay off my debt to the bank (they closed my account, went to another bank) and worked full-time again (with two jobs, both part-time). I went to another job in March 2009 and got employed in June to the place I work today in August 2020.

The mistakes I made

I finished MIH Volume One in the summer of 2009. I had a proofreader do the first twenty pages, and she wasn’t so interested in doing it anymore due to how brutal it got. I couldn’t get another proofreader to work with, so the rest of the book went unedited. I ran an ad on the Metro Times (a free entertainment paper in Detroit) and sold about 10 books. Got a bad review from someone on Amazon. Not good.

I also made custom bookmarks and permission from coffee shops and local libraries and was able to sell a few books, another bad review. My book was unedited (sans the first twenty pages), and that review pointed that out. At the end of it all, The Mourning In Hochington series is a total joke. I have used characters in the book for my EAS scenarios. And Det. Nora Bell is being used for my upcoming book, The Gambler Volume Two. Here are some characters I used for other projects:

Andrew Oloing – The killer that got caught. He later escapes prison in the WishesNetwork EAS Power Outage / Prison Break. He dies like Lester Nygaard in the Fargo TV Series Season One, sans the snowmobile, doing a failed run to Canada on the frozen St. Clair River. His body is later recovered. (Died: 17 Dec 2017)

Drake McNally – One of the town bullies in Volume One. Sees Clay Rarset beat up lead town bully Kris Yasper in a failed attempt to stab Mr. Rarset. He runs in fear. I can’t remember if he was in Volume Two. In Day of the Twisters EAS Scenario, Drake publicly defecates into a sewer while high on psychedelic drugs. Claire Barrington witnesses this and calls him a sick fuck on the radio, with local folks laughing at him. Rod later states Drake gets arrested and is from the city of Armada.

Scott Oloing – Andrew’s father. Also, in Day of the Twisters EAS. After a tornado smashed New Haven, police find a kiddie porn dungeon belonging to him, and he is arrested. Rod tells the WRQ audience that Scott was Andrew’s Dad, one of the Hochington killers.

---