Saturday, October 30, 2021
Thursday, October 28, 2021
Tuesday, October 26, 2021
Check Out "Honour’s Rest", The Rite Way, Book 1, by Judith Crow
The Rite Way
Book 1
by Judith Crow
Genre: Young Adult Magical Realism
Publisher: Crowvus
Date of Publication:11th October 2021
ISBN:978-1-913182-33-5
ASIN:B09FVM4KTW
Number of pages:289
Word Count:84525
Cover Artist: Clemency Crow
Book Description:
“So, it’s – what – like magic?”
No, according to Pen’s uncle, the Rite is not magic at all. But, if it’s not magic, then how could Pen push the school bully into a pond while he was really studying alone in the library?
When Pen’s family realise he has the Rite, he is sent to live with his Uncle Napier, who can help him control his ability.
But Napier has other duties. He is the Rendelf, in charge of the Rite in the UK, and he has gathered many enemies over the years…
…enemies who would be delighted to use Pen against him.
Excerpt Two (815 Words):
Pen wished he would never have to think about the Guardians’ Room again, but it wouldn’t leave his thoughts until he left Honour’s Rest and returned down to England to spend Easter with his parents, who were both relieved and overjoyed to see him again. However, he was irritated when he discovered that Napier had been in touch with Jarvis to make a demand which Pen guessed was punishment for what had happened. It was his mother who told him of Napier’s insistence that Pen went into the school to take full responsibility for what had happened to Justin Murchison a year earlier.
“That hardly seems fair,” Pen had snapped, as he sat on his bed plucking the guitar strings. “Am I supposed to tell him exactly what happened?”
“Your uncle thinks it will do you good to accept responsibility, however you choose to do so,” his mother replied. “You know, Pendragon, I think he’s right. You know it was you, so the only lie you’ll be telling will be that you told a lie in the first place.”
“But that’s just it, isn’t it? I haven’t told any lies so far.”
However, the last day of term found him sitting outside Mr Carling’s office again, this time in casual clothes and with the knowledge that he was working for a greater good which his old headteacher couldn’t even begin to comprehend.
“Pendragon Devon.” Mr Carling beamed as he opened his office door and saw the boy, who got to his feet and smiled. “Well, look at you. You’re a young gentleman now. Your parents must be proud.”
“Thank you, sir,” Pen said with a slight bow of his head. The old-fashioned mannerisms he had picked up from Napier seemed to jar with the surroundings, but his ideas of etiquette had changed while he had been at Honour’s Rest. “Perhaps we could discuss things in your office.”
He indicated to the door, and Mr Carling looked at him strangely for a moment. Pen could hear his thoughts, wondering what could have happened to the boy he had known to make him so altered. There was surprise there, amusement and, much to Pen’s annoyance, an element of pride. Unaware that the boy before him knew exactly what he was thinking, Mr Carling opened the door and led Pen into the office where, a year ago, he had sat crying at the thought of being excluded.
“Your parents tell me you’ve been living in Scotland? With your uncle?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And have you enjoyed that? Is he a good teacher? Do you miss people your own age?”
For a moment, Pen wasn’t sure whether the headteacher had spoken or whether he had just heard the questions as they had passed through Mr Carling’s mind. Still, he knew they all needed answering to maintain politeness, so Pen attempted to do so with the fewest possible manipulations of the truth.
“I love it,” he said. “The house is like something out of a novel, and I’ve been fortunate enough to have the company of a great friend who is my age. My Uncle Napier isn’t a bad teacher, but he believes in the importance of self-directed study. I’ve also had the opportunity to travel and, well, have adventures.” He felt his thumb rub absent-mindedly along the thin scar on his hand and wondered what the man in front of him would think if he told him exactly what had happened.
“Good, good,” Mr Carling said. “It was a shame about what happened, Pen. You were an excellent student and you’re missed by all the teachers. And most of the pupils as well.”
“That’s kind of you to say,” Pen said with a smile, bowing his head again and this time enjoying the puzzlement on the headteacher’s face and the sheer confusion in his mind. “But there’s one thing in particular that I came here to say.”
“And what’s that?”
“I should apologise for what happened. It was me who pushed Justin.”
“Don’t be silly, Pen,” Mr Carling said, with a nervous laugh. “Haven’t your parents told you? A couple of girls were taking pictures outside the library that day, and you were in the background.
You couldn’t possibly have done it.”
“All the same,” Pen said, trying to hide his annoyance at his mother for not telling him the truth,
“I was responsible.”
It was a great pleasure to know that the tables had been turned so, at the end of the conversation, it was Mr Carling who was nearly reduced to nervous tears, which wasn’t made any better when Pen accidentally answered a question which had not yet been spoken. It was only when he left the school with a smug sense of achievement and satisfaction that it occurred to him why Napier may have made the demand, and it had more to do with affection than punishment.
About the Author:
Judith was born in Orkney, grew up in Lincolnshire and now lives in the far
north of Scotland. Her work draws inspiration from folklore, experience and the
natural world.
The Backwater, Judith’s debut book, was a finalist in the Wishing Shelf Book
Awards 2019.
Judith followed this with Dance With Me in 2020 and her next novel, Honour’s
Rest, will be published in October 2021.
When she isn’t writing, Judith is a teacher at a primary school in Caithness.
She sometimes finds that writing gets usurped by crafting, music, and being a generally
doting spaniel owner.
https://www.facebook.com/JudithZKCrow
Monday, October 25, 2021
Saturday, October 23, 2021
New! CLOCKING OUT, 12 Timely Tales of Terror by Linda Mooney writing as Gail Smith
New!
CLOCKING OUT
12 Timely
Tales of Terror
by Linda Mooney writing as Gail Smith
Word
Count: 24.5K
$2.99
e / $6.99 p
Includes:
1:11
Epistaxis—Actual vampires don’t need fangs in order to feed.
2:22 Starlight, Starbright—An astronaut defies
orders not to return to Earth, but he does anyway…with dire consequences.
3:33 Rescue—Two detectives go in search of
thirteen missing children and the person responsible for their disappearances.
4:44 Forecast—A bizarre weather phenomenon
envelopes a city.
5:55 Firewood—He was warned about going into the
forest to gather firewood.
6:66 Sniffy—A young boy grieves for his beloved
pet.
7:77 Fortune—A teenager is informed he’s going to
meet his fate that evening.
8:88 Karma—An abused woman’s husband gets his
just desserts.
9:99 Second Date—He only dates young women with a
unique personality or physical makeup.
10:10 100 Strokes—To combat her thinning hair, she
thought she’d use an old tried-and-true method.
11:11 Mosquitoes—Her job was to test the blood of
mosquitoes for possible signs of infectious diseases.
12:12 Protector—He promised he would protect her
until his dying day.
Thursday, October 21, 2021
Wednesday, October 20, 2021
5 Unusual Halloween Activities with Vanessa Morgan & Evil Seeds: The Ultimate Movie Guide to Villainous Children
FIVE UNUSUAL HALLOWEEN ACTIVITIES
By Vanessa Morgan
Do you want to do something different for Halloween? Here are five unusual places you can visit.
A horror-themed museum
Torture museums are the obvious picks for Halloween. But what about a Museum of Vampires and Legendary Creatures, or a Museum of Fantastic Art?
A horror-themed escape game
Escape games are all the rage these days, and they come in a variety of different themes. For Halloween, pick one with a haunted house or horror topic. Will you make it out... alive?
An abandoned (haunted) house or building
They don't even have to be haunted; abandoned locations are creepy enough in and of itself, especially if you visit them at nighttime. A word of caution, though: Some of these places can be dangerous (holes in floors, falling bricks), so don't go exploring on your own.
A horror-themed restaurant or bar
The Vampire Cafe in Shinjuku, Japan, for example, has cross-shaped food, dark corners, blood-red decorations, and waiters dressed up as vampires and speaking with a Transylvanian accent. If you want to keep it more simple and close to home, you could opt for Lost Boys Pizza in London, England, named after the 1980s horror movie – complete with horror movie background music, black pizzas (Kale All Vampires, Fangs for the Memories), and horror-themed events (movie screenings, vampire yoga).
A horror film festival
Many cinemas host horror movie nights for Halloween, but it's even more fun to visit a horror film festival (such as Razor Reel) and enjoy horror films all week(end) long.
Which unusual Halloween place(s) would you like to visit?
to Villainous Children
Vanessa Morgan
Genre: horror, thriller,
movie reference, encyclopedia
Publisher: Moonlight Creek Publishing
Date of Publication: August 15, 2021
ASIN: B09CNSJRTF
Number of pages: 392
Word Count: 143.538
Cover Artist: Gilles Vranckx
Book Description:
Something's wrong with the children. They're murdering classmates, torturing parents, speaking in tongues, drinking human blood, and practicing black magic. Your offspring is on the rise, their blood no longer innocent. There will be casualties, and you may be among them.
Featuring nearly 250 of the creepiest, weirdest, and most dangerous kids ever to inhabit the cinematic landscape and sourced from over 40 different countries, Evil Seeds is THE comprehensive movie guide to villainous children in all their incarnations: the supernatural horror of ghosts and demonic possession, twisted tales of twins and changelings, dark matters of witches and evil babies, visceral frights of werewolves and vampires, the lurid lore of golems and trolls, and shocking drama of murderous orphans, juvenile serial killers, survivalist youngsters, and disturbing family values.
From cult classics to obscure fan favorites, Evil Seeds proves there is no shortage of frightening children. So keep an eye on your little darlings, or they might just fix their sights on YOU.
About the
Author:
Vanessa Morgan is the editor of the movie reference guides When Animals Attack:
The 70 Best Horror Movies with Killer Animals, Strange Blood: 71 Essays on Offbeat
and Underrated Vampire Movies, and Evil Seeds: The Ultimate Movie Guide to
Villainous Children. She also has had one cat book (Avalon) and four
supernatural thrillers (Drowned Sorrow, The Strangers Outside, A Good Man, and
Clowders) published. Three of her stories have been turned into movies. She has
written for myriad Belgian magazines and newspapers and introduces movie
screenings at several European film festivals. She is also a programmer for the
Offscreen Film Festival in Belgium. When she's not working on her latest book,
you can find her reading, watching movies, eating out, or photographing felines
for her blog Traveling Cats.
Twitter: http://twitter.com/eeriestories
Amazon Page: https://www.amazon.com/Vanessa-Morgan/e/B0092GUO2M
a Rafflecopter giveaway
Tuesday, October 19, 2021
Check Out "The Wantland Files", Book One, by Lara Bernhardt
This is a book of poems, and that appreciation only increased the older I got.
The works of Edgar Allan Poe intrigued me beginning in high school. I liked all his writing and was particularly fascinated with The Raven.
His poem Spirits of the Dead is perhaps less well known, but perfect for Halloween:
Spirits of the Dead
By Edgar Allan Poe
Thy soul shall find itself alone
’Mid dark thoughts of the grey tomb-stone—
Not one, of all the crowd, to pry
Into thine hour of secrecy:
Be silent in that solitude
Which is not loneliness—for then
The spirits of the dead who stood
In life before thee are again
In death around thee—and their will
Shall then overshadow thee: be still.
For the night—tho' clear—shall frown—
And the stars shall look not down,
From their high thrones in the Heaven,
With light like Hope to mortals given—
But their red orbs, without beam,
To thy weariness shall seem
As a burning and a fever
Which would cling to thee forever:
Now are thoughts thou shalt not banish—
Now are visions ne'er to vanish—
From thy spirit shall they pass
No more—like dewdrop from the grass:
The breeze—the breath of God—is still—
And the mist upon the hill
Shadowy—shadowy—yet unbroken,
Is a symbol and a token—
How it hangs upon the trees,
A mystery of mysteries!
Book One
Lara Bernhardt
Genre: supernatural suspense
Publisher: Admission Press
Date of Publication: December 16, 2016
ISBN: 978-0998426105
ASIN: B081RFTMR5
Number of pages: 286
Word Count: 73,470
Cover Artist: BEAUTeBOOK
Tagline: She sees dead people. He doesn’t believe in ghosts.
Book Description:
The X-Files meets Ghost Hunters when psychic Kimberly Wantland is forced to collaborate with skeptic Sterling Wakefield as she investigates a ghost terrorizing a young family in the season finale of her hit television series The Wantland Files.
Excerpt:
The frigid blast hit her, not a tidal wave crashing over her, but an iceberg, solid and powerful. And furious.
The icy shock took her breath away. She gasped.
The entity dropped from above and sailed past, blowing her hair behind her.
Strong, warm hands grasped her arms, intent on steadying her. She shook free as Drew screamed.“I told you to stay with the boy!” She crossed the room in three steps and knelt beside the toddler bed.
Drew no longer sat in the corner.
“Kimmy? What’s happening?” Michael called from the door.
“Just keep recording! She’s here. She’s powerful. Keep the cameras rolling.”
Danielle’s voice joined the fray. “What’s wrong? Drew! What’s happening?”
“Stay in your room,” she commanded as forcefully as she could with lungs chilled by the dark entity. “Stay with your baby!”
Her fingers trembled as she searched the bed. Every square inch of the miniature thing. Her chilled hands were not so numb that they would miss a toddler’s body. Where was he?
Frantic and scared, she lost control of her extrasensory perceptions. She stopped running her hands over the bed and held still. Clutching her crystal, she breathed deeply. Where was the entity? Where was the boy?
About the Author:
Lara Bernhardt is a Pushcart-nominated writer, editor, and audiobook narrator. She is Editor-in-Chief of Balkan Press and also publishes a literary magazine, Conclave. Twice a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award for Best Fiction, she writes supernatural suspense and women’s fiction.
You can follow her on all the socials @larawells1 on Twitter and @larabern10 on Facebook, BookBub, and Instagram.
Monday, October 18, 2021
Saturday, October 16, 2021
Friday, October 15, 2021
Check Out Urbantasm Book Three, "The Darkest Road" by Connor Coyne
The Darkest Road
by Connor Coyne
Genre: General Fiction / Young Adult
Subgenres: Magical Realism, Teen Noir, Edgy YA
Publisher: Gothic Funk Press
Date of Publication: 9/22/2021
ISBN: 978-0989920292 (Print)
Page Count 639
Word Count: About 230,000
Cover Artist: Sam Perkins-Harbin
Urbantasm: The Empty Room is the third book in the magical teen noir serial novel inspired by the author’s experiences growing up in and around Flint, Michigan.
Junior high was hard. John Bridge has made and lost friends, experienced and forsaken love, and discovered his true passions. But after his harrowing experience on the roof of St. Christopher’s hospital, John has decided to turn the page of his own life and plan for his future. Now he has new friends, a new girlfriend, and a powerful new goal: to get into Chicago and leave Akawe forever.
But Akawe might not want to let John go. The city is full of memories and ghosts — urbantasms, according his former friend Selby — and they leave traces of questions that John cannot easily escape: What happened to his abducted classmate Cora Braille? How does the Chalks street gang keep replenishing its stock of O-Sugar, a drug with seemingly magical properties? And why is Selby suddenly hanging out with a notorious drug dealer? Does it have anything to do with a man with a knife or some mysterious blue sunglasses?
John has a feeling that the dreadful answers to these questions might take him to a place that he does not want to go: a dark road in a forgotten corner of his dying city. Possibly the darkest road of all.
As a serial novel, Urbantasm has to be read in order.
New readers will want to start with Book One The Dying City.
Excerpt Book 3:
The summer dusk gave way to interstitial twilight. There was no sense in riding an hour back home in the dark just to turn around and come back the next morning. Instead, my friends and I bummed our way back to Camp Jellystone, where we got to camp in tents on the gravel and weeds off of the RV lot for five dollars a night. We sat around a fire and drank pop while the older actors – our mentors – went through six-packs of beer and homilized on their atheist Bibles. They quoted SNL routines, Monty Python, GURPS, Cthulhu, and the Digital Underground until we were all too tired to see straight. We all said goodnight and made our way back to our tents. But my tent had flooded during the week, and inside I found dead earwigs floating in slow circles.I didn’t mind.I was glad that this had happened.I gathered up my sleeping bag, which Eddie had dropped off in the morning before heading back to Akawe, and stumbled back through the purple dark to Omara’s tent.“Knock knock,” I said.I heard her sigh. “You got your own tent, John.”“Not tonight,” I said. “It’s flooded. Will you let me stay here?”“Fine,” she said. “If this ever gets back to my dad, he’ll murder you.”“I don’t think he will. I don’t think he’d murder a fly.”She didn’t argue. She knew that I was right. She unzipped the tent and beckoned me inside.In more than a year of going out, Omara and I hadn’t had sex. We hadn’t even been naked together. The driving thirst and curiosity that I had felt in seventh grade had been quenched by my confusing tumbles with Crystal. By my guilty nescience with Lucy. Still, here I was, sleeping bag in hand, stooped under the slope of the tent roof, wearing soccer shorts and a too-small t-shirt, and Omara stood before me, more stooped because she was taller than I was, her white panties and tank top bright against her dark skin. We unzipped our sleeping bags, made a bed between them, and lay down. Omara turned away from me, and I pressed into her back. I put my arm around her waist with my palm against her bare stomach. I could feel her shapes against mine, though there was still cloth between us.“It was a long day today,” she said.“Uh-huh,” I said.“We’d better get some sleep. It’s gonna be a long weekend. We got two more days to go. Then school. You know I got that job at the Olan Farm? It’s gonna be almost like this. I mean, I guess I’ll dress up like a milkmaid, like The Little House on the Prairie or something. But it’ll be acting, you know?”I sighed.“I’m not tired,” I said.“Me neither,” she said. And then, in a burst: “I can’t stop thinking about that woman on your block. Who murdered her baby.”I pushed myself against her. I held my breath. I said, “I can’t think about that. I mean. There’s nothing I can do about that. It makes me sick, but what does that even accomplish?”“But doesn’t it just stick with you? The idea of it? How awful it –”“I don’t want it to, okay? Anyway, it’s far away. We’re here now. Let’s stay here.”“We can’t stay here.” I felt the tenseness in Omara’s back. “Yeah. But someday, we’ll leave Akawe for good. And anyway. We aren’t there now.”“Aren’t you afraid your dad’s gonna lose his job?”“My father? Yeah. He’s already driving two hours each day ever since they transferred him to Canton. Ever since that strike ended last year, it seems like X is closing everything fast as they can. You know? I mean, they closed the Benedict Main. Most of the Old Benedict. Probably RAN, too. ‘Course, my aunt says they were going to close them all anyway.”Omara laughed. A slight untensing. “Sounds like you have thought about it.”“I think about lots of things a lot. Some things I don’t want to think about and some things I do. I mean, I think about you a lot.”I was trying to move toward her. In, you know, ways. But she wasn’t taking the bait.“Aren’t you afraid they won’t be able to pay for college?”She’d finally succeeded. Omara’s fears had become my fears.“No,” I said. “I mean, my mother is working at that new job at XAI. And even if my father gets laid off, he’s got options. Right? Transfer to other plants. Stuff like that. What about you? Why are you worried? Didn’t your grandparents get you a savings bond or something?”“Yeah. But I keep thinking someone’s gonna open a trapdoor beneath me or something. I guess ... I guess I keep thinking I’ll believe in college when I get there. And not before. It just seems a bad idea to get my hopes up, you know?”“You don’t have to worry about it for a while. It’s still years off. I mean, we just have to keep working, don’t we? It’ll happen. We just need to be patient or some shit, you know?”The wind buffeted the tent over our heads. I could hear low talking outside. Low chuckles. Through the tent wall, I could see the embers of the fire flickering faintly. Some of the older actors would be slouching in their folding chairs until the sky started to gray with dawn. That was still several hours away. I listened to it for a long, slow minute.“I do worry,” I confided. “I worry that something will happen that I don’t expect, and I’ll get stuck. That I’ll fail a class, fail a test I need to pass ... and I won’t get into college in Chicago, or I won’t get into college anywhere. I worry that my parents are lying about everything, and they can’t pay for shit. I worry that I’m just being set up to fail. I even worry ...” I caught my breath. Saying this all out loud was hard. Trusting a human being was hard. But at least I wasn’t looking into her eyes. At least the darkness of a September tent wrapped us and kept our secrets from everyone else.“I worry,” I whispered, “that you’ll go away to college in Chicago, and I’ll be stuck in Akawe, and I’ll never get out.”I heard a deep breath from Omara. I felt her belly raise beneath my cupped palm. She had fallen asleep, and I was grateful.
Urbantasm Book Two
The Empty Room
Connor Coyne
Publisher: Gothic Funk Press
Date of Publication: September 2019
Number of pages:
Word Count: 175,000
Cover Artist: Sam Perkins-Harbin, Forge22 Design
Book Description:
Urbantasm: The Empty Room is the second book in the magical teen noir serial novel inspired by the author’s experiences growing up in and around Flint, Michigan.
John Bridge is only two months into junior high and his previously boring life has already been turned upside-down. His best friend has gone missing, his father has been laid-off from the factory, and John keeps looking over his shoulder for a mysterious adversary: a man with a knife and some perfect blue sunglasses.
As if all this wasn’t bad enough, John must now confront his complicated feelings for a classmate who has helped him out of one scrape after another, although he knows little about who she is and what she wants. What does it mean to want somebody? How can you want them if you don’t understand them? Does anybody understand anyone, ever? These are hard questions made harder in the struggling city of Akawe, where the factories are closing, the schools are closing, the schools are crumbling, and even the streetlights can’t be kept on all night.
John and his friends are only thirteen, but they are fighting for their lives and futures. Will they save Akawe, will they escape, or are they doomed? They might find their answers in an empty room… in a city with ten thousand abandoned houses, there will be plenty to choose from.
Urbantasm Book One
The Dying City
Connor Coyne
Genre: YA, Magical Realism, New Adult, Teen Noir, Lit Fic
Publisher: Gothic Funk Press
Date of Publication: September 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0989920230
ASIN: 0989920232
Number of pages: 450 pages
Word Count: 85,000
Cover Artist: Sam Perkins-Harbin,
Cover Artist: Sam Perkins-Harbin,
Forge22 Design
Book Description:
Urbantasm is a magical teen noir serial novel inspired by the author’s experiences growing up in and around Flint, Michigan.
Thirteen-year-old John Bridge’s plans include hooking up with an eighth-grade girl and becoming one of the most popular kids at Radcliffe Junior High, but when he steals a pair of strange blue sunglasses from a homeless person, it drops him into the middle of a gang war overwhelming the once-great Rust Belt town of Akawe.
John doesn’t understand why the sunglasses are such a big deal, but everything, it seems, is on the table. Perhaps he accidentally offended the Chalks, a white supremacist gang trying to expand across the city. Maybe the feud involves his friend Selby, whose father died under mysterious circumstances. It could even have something to do with O-Sugar, a homegrown drug with the seeming ability to distort space. On the night before school began, a group of teenagers took O-Sugar and leapt to their deaths from an abandoned hospital.
John struggles to untangle these mysteries while adjusting to his new school, even as his parents confront looming unemployment and as his city fractures and burns.
“A novel of wonder and horror.”— William Shunn, author of The Accidental Terrorist
About the Author:
Connor Coyne is a writer living and working in Flint, Michigan.
His serial novel Urbantasm is winner of numerous awards. Hugo- and Nebula-nominee William Shunn has praised Urbantasm as “a novel of wonder and horror.”
Connor has also authored two other celebrated novels, Hungry Rats and Shattering Glass, as well as Atlas, a collection of short stories.
Connor’s essay “Bathtime” was included in the Picador anthology Voices from the Rust Belt. His work has been published by Vox.com, Belt Magazine, Santa Clara Review, and elsewhere.
Connor is Director of Gothic Funk Press. He has served on the planning committee for the Flint Festival of Writers and represented Flint’s 7th Ward as its artist-in-residence for the National Endowment for the Arts’ Our Town grant. In 2007, he earned his Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the New School.
Connor lives in Flint, Michigan less than a mile from the house where he grew up.
Urbantasm: http://urbantasm.com
Author Website: http://connorcoyne.com
Newsletter Signup: http://eepurl.com/bzZvb5
Blog: http://connorcoyne.com/blog
Twitter: https://twitter.com/connorcoyne
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@blueskiesfalling
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/connorcoyne
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/connorryancoyne
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/connorcoyne
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4218298.Connor_Coyne
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