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've set a date and I'm going for broke. This is the last time this ebook collection will be offered for free. You can download it on Amazon for $0.00 starting on 4/24 and going all the way through 4/28. If you read my book, leave me a review on the Amazon page and/or Goodreads if you have the time. For now, I must get back to work on my latest book. Details to come...
I've finished editing the Ecto Chronicles... again. The remastered collection is now available on Amazon, Hopefully the new cover will also pop in soon. You will also notice that my individual Ecto book thumbnails on my site are now gone. I've taken the ebooks down from Amazon in favor of just having the omnibus there. The individual books are however still available on Nook.
I plan on giving the new Ecto Chronicles ebook away on Amazon for a time in maybe a week or so, so stay tuned.
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've just released an omnibus ebook that includes all four ecto books in it for $3.99 exclusively on Amazon. It's called the Ecto Chronicles and it is by far the best constructed, best formatted and best looking presentation of the tales thus far. It's also a bargain, considering I bumped the price of the individual ebooks back to $1.99 each. Everything including the individual ebooks has, (or is getting) a new coat of paint with functioning front matter minor story tweaks and uniform formatting.
