Condition Red: Funny Stories for Scary Times: Funny Stories for Scary Times

• Every morning Jack Strangehorn wakes up, gets ready for work, sees his wife's face, and turns into a pillar of salt.
• Aaron Whitman learns the secret of eternal life by committing suicide.
• What if you had a regular Tuesday chess date in the park — with Adolf Hitler?
• Instructions for living in your new glass house.
• Obituaries of the Rich & Famous

His next effort, the literary quarterly, Statement, met with greater success, becoming a home for and featuring the work of Los Angeles luminaries including Charles Bukowski, Neely Cherry, Steve Richmond, Mack Riley and Margolis himself. When Margolis established a Southern California Poetry Circuit, he and Bukowski often traveled together, reading their work at colleges and coffee shops, and later, took turns publishing one another in their own magazines (Bukowski in Margolis's Statement, and Margolis in Bukowski's Man the Humping Gun and Laugh Literary).

After graduating with an MFA from the UCLA Film School, Margolis's first screenplay caught the attention of several talent agencies and he signed with the prestigious Phil Gersh Agency where he turned out screenplays on everything from the Wright Brothers to Abbie Hoffman, the Weather Underground to the Temple of Eternal Confusion. His work can be seen in films like Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun, The China Syndrome, and the cult classic Death Race 2000.

Moving to Portland with his wife and young son in 1976, Margolis continued to work as a screenwriter, served as film critic for Willamette Week and The Downtowner, and taught film classes at Mt. Hood Community College and the Northwest Film Study Center (where he has taught screenwriting for over twenty years).

Margolis's poetry and fiction has been published in the U.S., Canada, England, and France. Condition Red: Funny Stories for Scary Times is his first book.