Welcome to the Trent Directory
Home To The Works of Trent Ryan Katzenberger
What I'm Working On
New Horror Story
I am always working on a new short piece, usually a horror story, almost always with the intention of posting it to Reddit before attempting to submit it somewhere as a reprint. I've got a ton of ideas and I can't wait to get them out to you! ; 3
That Electric Christmas Glow
tl;dr:
Trainspotting meets Ready Player One.
This, my first novel, is a tale of melancholy existence and struggling through the doldrums of life; it aims to capture that feeling of treading water, desperately scanning the horizon in search of something, anything that might help you break out of this awful and unending situation you find yourself in, only to slowly realize that there is nothing but more water in every single direction and that all you can do is continue to tread water, hoping with all your heart that your tireless struggle will one day bring you close enough to something that you can grab hold of to pull yourself out of this maddening period of purgatory and into something better.
The much shorter explanation is that this is an attempt to make a more grounded and personal version of Ready Player One; keeping all the interesting parts and replacing all the teen wish fulfillment with the struggles of poverty, addiction, and the heartbreaking floundering many of us find ourselves going through in our post-teenage days.
The whole thing is essentially an attempt to create a story to put to this image:
This is a story about struggling. The struggle to keep a relationship afloat through the worst parts of life and the doubts such stress brings about in said lovers, the struggle to keep yourself sane when it feels like nothing can ever get better and no matter how hard you try the world will refuse to let you accomplish even a single one of your perfectly reasonable dreams, the struggle to pull yourself up by your bootstraps and for your friends to stay with you and offer help whilst they try to do the same, the struggle of man over time, time which obsolesces, time that destroys technologies, people, and relationships, lives and livelihoods, and which eventually claims us all.
So, if the idea of following the struggles of two people, in love and in trouble, fighting to pull themselves up out of their own hole by solving the mystery at the bottom of the Virtual Reality Internet, which has been the focus of the lives of them and their friends for years now as this, the first version of the virtual web takes it's last gasp and is finally terminated due to its replacement by the easier and more user friendly VNET 2.0 then, by all means, check back for updates as this future draws ever nearer.
Weird Shit of the South
tl;dr:
An immigrant and a good old boy do the magickal X-Files all across the American South.
In WSS we follow Abood, the magician, and Spart, the hunter, as they investigate strange happenings all throughout the backroads and mountainsides, town squares and trailer parks of the states below the Mason-Dixon line.
Now, staying in the South ain't by choice, mind, it's just our boys ain't got a lot of cash to throw around, so they take what work they can get to, starting with what's close by Spart's hand-built shack in the woods up by the Tenessee-Alabama border.
Starting with his home state, our boys take on everything from ghosts to demons, helping where help is needed and taking what reward can be offered. It may not seem like much to start but this is exactly what Abood trained for and exactly why he came to America; to use his magick to help people in need and to make the world a better place. And in turn, Abood's sudden appearance at Spart's door was exactly what he had needed to drag him out of the darkness that had wrapped itself around his life and bring him back to planet Earth.
With our boy's skillsets complimenting each other, and their wits playing off one another, the word starts to spread and they find themselves the operators of the hottest paranormal investigation business this side of the Atlantic. But investigating the strange means that there's a chance of uncovering things people might not want uncovered and stumbling upon deeper, darker mysteries than anyone knew were lurking in the backwoods of America's Deep South.
With adventures and characters both grim and fantastical, whimsical and brutal, horrific and touching, Weird Shit of the South will be a trip through America's backwoods and mythologies unlike anything else you have seen!