Been an eternity since I did this... Exciting news for me. The book I've been writing since the end of 2016 is live and available for free download RIGHT NOW, (7/31/23 - 8/2/23.) It's my first full length novel, clocking in at 92k words which is a significant personal accomplishment because I've been trying to write a 'real book' by my definition for 14 years and this is the first time it feels like I actually pulled it off.
Oblivion Girls is set in 1938 New York State. It's a first person noire-adjacent horror mystery that's shaped by my brief stint living in a secluded cabin in the mountains (when I started writing it.)
Here is the synopsis:
The worst hell is the one you make yourself…
It's 1938. Norman Hewitt is an NYC homicide detective with a haunted past. Still anguishing over the loss of his wife and only daughter, he goes on a pilgrimage to their once frequented lakeside camping spot in the country. But his hopes of finally laying his demons to rest are quickly scuttled when he wrecks his car taking a detour. The only thing around for miles is Juniper Gates, a secluded orphanage for girls, tucked away in the Catskills where time seems to have stopped.
Norman finds himself stranded there indefinitely as the orphanage has no working vehicle, no working phone, and no one seems to ever come by the house from the outside world. Forced to settle in and while away his time at a strange place that becomes stranger by the day, he begins to spend time with some of the less caustic residents. Agnes, a strange girl continually spying on him, shares her account of a cover-up and a girl who went missing from the house, a mystery too enticing to ignore. But as he tugs at the veil of the old orphanage, an insidious conspiracy comes into focus that plunges him into a twisted nightmare of dark memories, horrifying secrets, and worst fears come to life.
If you're a movie person, my new title is like the tragic existential journey of wonderment in 'What Dreams May Come' with the world-bending madness of 'Inception' and the traumatic psychological dread of 'Jacob's Ladder.'
It's dark, provocative and visceral.
Themes include:
Grief and guilt
The fluidity of memory
Empathy and forgiveness and who deserves them
Keeping secrets
Concrete versus abstract thought
Autonomy and consent
The cycle of violence
Self flagellation
Perdition and purgatory
It's is a slow boil that bubbles over and out of control just after you think you've settled in. It's both heart wrenching and heartwarming and you'll feel conflicted about many of the characters.
Here's a Pinterest mood board for the story if you're interested in that.
Here's the Spotify playlist for the story which I guess is also a sort of mood board.
Oblivion Girls is available for download as an ebook on Amazon for Kindle or the Kindle app. It's on promotion for the first three days, (as is traditional,) so you can acquire it for free if you snatch it up quickly.
The Phylum: The Bulogan Incident ebook is now available for purchase on Amazon. The free download promotion will begin on February 10 and last through the 14th.
On a secluded island in the northeast Philippines is a hospital with a
covert genetic research wing. When their benchmark experimental subject
escapes into the wild, project lead Leslie Carmichael decides to cover
it up and take care of the situation by his own means. But the subject's
exposure to the outside world yields horrific results no one could have
predicted, a breed which can evolve at will to appease its desire to
feed. People disappear and life in the small island community of Bulogan
becomes increasingly disrupted. When things escalate beyond
Carmichael's control, the real stakes are finally revealed: the
extinction of life itself.
They are what they eat...
I just hit 50,000 words while writing my new Sci-fi novel. It's about 80-85% finished. The new book is called Phylum and is set in the present day Philippines. I will update with a proper blurb or synopsis one of these days. Until then here are some appropriate tags: Conspiracy, Island, Jungle, Genetics, Monster, Medical, Hunting, Ocean, Research, Hybrid, Entropy, Evolution, Classification, Isolation, Horror, Action, Thriller.
After years of putting off getting a Twitter account, I finally made one and it was a jogging class of all things which forced me to do it. Oh well, as a writer, I should have one anyway.
My life has been grueling the past few months. I have written almost nothing because I had no spare time at all.
Three things:
1. I am probably going to do some consolidating by taking down the four smaller Ecto ebooks from internet publishers in favor of just promoting the big omnibus The Ecto Chronicles.
2. I'm finally going to give this site it's long needed face lift. In fact I've already started.
3. I'm currently about 15% into writing a new science fiction novel set in present day earth. More details to come.
My new ebook, The Drop, is out now on Amazon for $1.99. It took me forever to come up with a name for it in order to start conceptualizing a cover. Eventually I just went with the name that I could think of the best concept for. But I literally had this finished book sitting around for weeks waiting for me to give it a name.
Here is the synopses:
Sixteen-year-old Reon Saix is a retired smuggler trying to turn his life around. When his plans fall through, old habits die hard. He takes one last job to dig himself out of the hole but quickly finds that this is no ordinary job.
There's a lot more substance and plot points to it than that but you'll just have to read it to find out. I went more of a YA direction with this piece but that's not to say adults can't enjoy it. It just has a younger protagonist and is generally more wholesome than my last works. If it was a movie it would likely get a PG-13 rating versus R like the rest of my books.
I'm currently working on a brand new book. It doesn't have a name yet but it's a little over half way finished. It's in the genre of sci-fi action/adventure. It has nothing to do with ectos, it's not post-apocalyptic and it's not set on Earth. I'll release more details on it later...
