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Very interesting stuff. Primarily, they wanted to know what I thought about the relationship between sound and horror. I’ll post the interview when it’s done. I think they’ve interviewed several people on the issue and are going to splice it all together later on.

Hey guys. I wanted to remind you of this offer I made a few weeks ago. People have started claiming their free books, and I wanted to make sure you didn’t miss out. Here it is again.

Buy a copy of the special edition. If you don’t know about the special edition, here are the details.

The Limbus, Inc. limited edition is a sewn, case-bound hardcover, that includes 60lb Creekside natural interior paper, a Corona leather-stamped case, and a 100 lb Litho Label Gloss slip cover.  It includes interior artwork from Alan M. Clark that is not a part of the regular hard cover or paperback editions.  An additional novella from Jonathan Maberry (over 8,000 bonus words) is added as well, to go along with some insights from author Anne C. Petty on the world of Limbus, Inc.

This is a numbered limited edition with approximately 250 being produced.  It will be autographed by all five authors (Jonathan Maberry, Benjamin Kane Ethridge, Brett J. Talley, Joseph Nassise and Anne C. Petty) along with the artist, Alan M. Clark.  The approximate page count is 344 pages.

Added to all that, you get an electronic copy of Limbus, Inc. for free! Now, I know a lot of you are probably pretty tempted by that offer, but I also know that it’s a tough economy out there. Times are tough, and maybe you can’t shell out fifty bucks for a single book, no matter how awesome it is.

That’s where this deal comes in.

If you buy a copy of the special edition of Limbus, Inc., simply send me a copy of the receipt you receive from Journalstone and I will kick in a copy of That Which Should Not Be or The Void–signed paperback or e-copy, your choice–for free. All I ask is for you to post an honest review of Limbus, Inc. and your free book on Goodreads or Amazon (or both). I’m limiting the print copies of the books I’ll give away to ten (I am, after all, a starving artist). But there’s no such limit on e-copies.

So what are you waiting on?

First, thank you. Even at 99 cents, I know that times are tough, and your willingness to spend your money on me is an honor. This weekend was a tremendous success. We sold hundreds of books (both That Which Should Not Be and The Void were in the top 100 in horror, with TWSNB cracking the top ten). This site received thousands of visitors, more by far than usual. Now I want to ask one more thing of you.

People often ask me what they can do to help with my writing. I always tell them the same thing–buying my books is wonderful, but your words are far more valuable. When you finish with the books, tell your friends about them. Write a review on Amazon or Goodreads. Most authors don’t have a multi-million dollar ad agency. Most authors don’t have a publicist. I certainly don’t. All I’ve got is you, the readers. My success depends on you, and I am so thankful for all you do.

Now go read, and beware the shadows…

This your last chance to pick up That Which Should Not Be and The Void, both available on Amazon for just 99 cents. And if that’s not enough, ALL of Journalstone’s award winning novels–Ter0v0las,Twice Shy, Jokers Club, and The Devil of Echo Lake–are also available for 99 cents. That’s not even enough money to get a 20 ounce drink these days. Buy a book. I promise you’ll love it.

Am I insane? Are you? One of us is if you don’t pick up That Which Should Not Be and The Void, both available on Amazon for just 99 cents. And if that’s not enough, ALL of Journalstone’s award winning novels–Ter0v0las,Twice Shy, Jokers Club, and The Devil of Echo Lake–are also available for 99 cents. That’s a lot of great books for less than six dollars. Buy them. What do you have to lose?

Time is running out!

Early one Saturday morning in March, I left my hotel in Kiev and headed down to the McDonalds (cause it is always McDonalds) to meet up with representatives of Chernobylwel.com, the company that would be taking me on an adventure unlike any other, a trip into the radioactive lands of Ukraine. After several hours (the site, fortunately for the people of Ukraine, is a hundred kilometers from Kiev), we arrived at the border of the city of Chernobyl.

It was a city that was very proud of its selection as host to what was to be the largest nuclear power plant in the world, with twelve reactors providing enough electricity to light up all of eastern Europe. They only finished four. Here’s number five.

It is as they left it, 27 years ago, in the middle of construction. The entire facility, including the cranes used for construction, is irradiated. Dismantling it and selling it for scrap was not an option, and the cranes themselves are forever useless. Thus, they simply left it all in place, until one day time and the elements tears the whole thing down. Here are the half-constructed cooling towers.

Within sight, reactor 4.

Reactor 4 is on the left. Within the concrete and steel shell that now covers it–called the sarcophagus–lie the remains of the nuclear reactor that melted down during a test of redundant safety mechanisms. Firefighters and other personnel rushed into the burning nightmare that must have been the inside of Chernobyl, on a suicide mission to contain the fire, open the cooling valves, and prevent the disaster from being one that would render Ukraine, and indeed much of central Europe, uninhabitable. They succeeded, though they lost their lives in the process.

The inscription reads, “To Those Who Saved The World.”

But the work of cleanup continues on, for what’s left of the reactor remains.

5,000 people work rotating shifts to maintain the sarcophagus and prevent a new disaster. They eat at a diner less than a quarter of a mile away from reactor 4, the object of their employment always within sight. We ate lunch with them. Before doing so, one must pass a radiation test, one of five that we underwent while in the area.

If you fail, they kill you. Or something. It was never quite clear what would happen if the green light failed to come on.

It is critical that the sarcophagus remain intact. “Fuel containing masses”–nuclear lava to the uninitiated, what you get when a reactor literally melts down–fill the building, having flowed red-hot through pipes and down hallways. Being in their presence–even for a few moments–is deadly. They will remain radioactive for 100,000 years, give or take a century. The sarcophagus, meanwhile, is falling apart. Enter Novarka.
This is the new sarcophagus, 25% finished.

When completed, it will be slid by railroad tracks over the current tomb. At that point, the ends will be sealed, and the next phase of cleaning up the worst nuclear disaster in history begins–dismantling the plant and removing the nuclear waste.

But it is too late for Prypiat and the 50,000 residents who called it home. They were forced to leave with almost no notice, told to take supplies for the three days that they would be gone. Of course, they were never allowed to return. Their city is the quintessential ghost town, a modern-day Pompei. Here are some of the hundreds of images we took, a pale shadow of the awe-inspiring emptiness of the city.

And so we left Chernobyl behind, a place that we will never forget and that will never be completely the same.

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If you’ve been waiting to pick up one of my books, this weekend is the time. E-copies of both That Which Should Not Be and The Void are available on Amazon for just 99 cents. And if that’s not enough, ALL of Journalstone’s award winning novels–Ter0v0las, Twice Shy, Jokers Club, and The Devil of Echo Lake—are also available for 99 cents. That’s a lot of great books for less than six dollars. Buy them. What do you have to lose?

Oh, and did I say this weekend? I meant right NOW! Already got them? Send them to your friends as a gift!

You know, I was skeptical of Heart-Shaped Box at first. I give Joe Hill props for the nom de plume (he is the son of horror megastar Stephen King and Tabitha King, no writing slouch in her own right), but I still wondered if perhaps the praise he has received for his first book had more to do with his lineage than the writing itself. When I started the book, it seemed as though my first impressions might be correct, but 30 or so pages in the novel kicks into high gear and never slows down. From that point on, it’s page turner all the way.

From the book jacket:

Judas Coyne is a collector of the macabre: a cookbook for cannibals . . . a used hangman’s noose . . . a snuff film. An aging death-metal rock god, his taste for the unnatural is as widely known to his legions of fans as the notorious excesses of his youth. But nothing he possesses is as unlikely or as dreadful as his latest discovery, an item for sale on the Internet, a thing so terribly strange, Jude can’t help but reach for his wallet.

I will “sell” my stepfather’s ghost to the highest bidder. . . .

For a thousand dollars, Jude will become the proud owner of a dead man’s suit, said to be haunted by a restless spirit. He isn’t afraid. He has spent a lifetime coping with ghosts—of an abusive father, of the lovers he callously abandoned, of the bandmates he betrayed. What’s one more?

But what UPS delivers to his door in a black heart-shaped box is no imaginary or metaphorical ghost, no benign conversation piece. It’s the real thing.

And suddenly the suit’s previous owner is everywhere: behind the bedroom door . . . seated in Jude’s restored vintage Mustang . . . standing outside his window . . . staring out from his widescreen TV. Waiting—with a gleaming razor blade on a chain dangling from one bony hand. . . .

Good writing must run in the genes is all I’ve got to say. Ghost stories are hard to pull off. They’ve been done a thousand times before. Ghosts aren’t all that scary compared to some other subjects of discussion, and it’s hard to kill them. But Heart-Shaped Box accomplishes the feat of dealing with every one of those problems. If you like ghost stories, then this is the book for you. And maybe you’ll learn a lesson, too. When somebody offers to sell you a ghost, just click no thanks.

Heads Up: Heart-Shaped Box has all the violence and sexually situations one might expect from such a novel, so if you aren’t into that kind of thing, you might want to look elsewhere.

4 Stars

So I am finishing up The Immortal Body, a really nice Lovecraftian novel that I think horror fans will love. Review to come. I’ve also received an early copy of Mark Matthew’s On the Lips of Children (great title). Interesting guy. You can follow him here.

Meanwhile, TWSNB II is coming along. I’m going to want some beta readers for this one, so keep that in mind for the future…

For whatever reason, “intelligent” is a word you rarely use to describe horror movies. Maybe it’s because writers think they can get away with slapping pretty much anything on a piece of paper when they are writing a screenplay. Maybe it’s because characters usually have to do some pretty stupid things to get in horrifying situations. I don’t really know the answer. And that’s why movies like Absentia are as rare as they are pleasing to watch.

I’ll let the distributors of the movie tell you what it’s all about:

Tricia’s husband has been missing for seven years. Her younger sister Callie comes to live with her as the pressure mounts to finally declare him ‘dead in absentia.’ As Tricia sifts through the wreckage and tries to move on with her life, Callie finds herself drawn to an ominous tunnel near the house. As she begins to link it to other mysterious disappearances, she comes to the realization that his presumed death might be anything but ‘natural.’ Soon it becomes clear that the ghostly force at work in the tunnel might have set its sights on Callie and Tricia too.

Absentia is character driven horror with a Lovecraftian bent. Whatever lurks in the tunnel near Tricia’s house has been around for a very long time, something we learn as Callie–who has her own dark secrets in her past–begins to investigate. The terror is, of course, somewhat limited–it’s not like the tunnel is going to move–but it portends a lot of horrifying consequences. If here, why not anywhere? Who can say what dark forces lurk just outside our doors? And where do all those people who just up and disappear go to, anyway?

Well worth the money and time, Absentia is great fun for any horror fan willing to put aside the faster pace and dumber scares of your typical scary flick fare.

4 out of 5 Stars

It’s rare that I post something on this blog that could change your life, but this is it. Two years ago, I was a guy with a finished horror manuscript and a hundred really polite rejection letters from agents and publishers. Then I entered the Journalstone Horror Contest, and the rest is history. Journalstone is a fantastic company, and there’s no better way to get their attention than this contest. Enter it, and good luck. If you decide to enter, let me know in the comments.

Happy Easter everyone!

The best way to start off this review of Graeme Reynolds’s High Moor 2: Moonstruck is with a glance back at what I had to say about the original High Moor:

I truly loved this book. Once I started to really read it, I finished the novel in a day and a half. Whenever I put it down, I found myself coming back to it almost impulsively. I haven’t been this addicted to something since I downloaded Angry Birds. Recommended without reservation to anyone who is a fan of horror or anyone that wants to be. High Moor is the kind of book that will make converts of us all.

It goes without saying that I was anticipating High Moor 2 immensely, but also with some trepidation. After such a great debut, could Reynolds keep it up? Was there any way that he could match the intensity of the original, the page-turning ferocity of its werewolves? Would we end up with a mindless retread? More werewolves, more killing, more boring? I was afraid, my friends. Well, now I’ve read the book and I have my verdict.

Not only is High Moor 2 an incredible ride worthy of my expectations, indeed, it accomplishes something truly rare—it surpasses the original.

SPOILERS AHEAD

High Moor 2 begins precisely where High Moor left off. John Simpson is in police custody, accused of brutally murdering (and eating) several people. The love of his life, Maria, is in the morgue, the authorities under the impression she is dead. Meanwhile, werewolf hunter Steven is in a coma, with the first stirrings of the beasts he has spent his life hunting surging through his blood. Meanwhile, teams of werewolves are on their way to High Moor, intent on destroying the evidence and keeping the existence of the pack a secret. And that means killing John Simpson.

END SPOILERS

One thing that is certainly the case—if you liked High Moor, you will like this book. Reynolds writes as if the last book never stopped. The style is crisp, the story doesn’t seem forced, and the action doesn’t let up. New characters are introduced with ease, and Reynolds makes us care for them almost immediately. Which just makes it all the better when werewolves start eating them. I’m going to repeat from my original review, because it is appropriate here.

The werewolves in Reynolds’s novel are of two varieties. Most can change at will, controlling the beast within while also harnessing its power. Others are “moonstruck,” able to change only upon the full moon. They are wild and vicious, and the pack werewolves hunt them down, lest they reveal their secret to the world. And let me tell you, there is a lot of hunting, a lot of fighting, and a lot of killing. No character is safe in Reynolds’s world, and that he establishes this fact early on heightens the tension in every werewolf encounter. His descriptions of the attacks are so rich and vivid that you will see them in your mind’s eye with a clarity normally reserved for movies. And it is that talent with description that may be Reynolds’s strongest suit. The man isn’t just writing a scene. He is creating a world for his characters to inhabit.

This book is amazing. It has some of the most gut wrenching scenes of horror I have ever read, and Reynolds is an absolute master of an action scene. If you haven’t read the High Moor series, don’t worry. These books are so good that I fully expect they will have a Hollywood treatment at some point in the future.

Verdict: Reynolds has knocked it out of the park. High Moor was shortlisted for a Bram Stoker Award. I wouldn’t be surprised to see High Moor 2: Moonstruck win the whole shebang.

5 Stars

I just realized that, in celebration of his new novel, Graeme Reynolds is giving away High Moor for free. Seriously guys, if you don’t have the book, you should get it now…