Next week Pierce Mostyn and the OUP gang ride again, in another terrifyingly action-packed tale of cosmic horror.
The Rub’ al Khali, or the Empty Quarter, is a fascinating place. I find it almost as intriguing as Antarctica.
What makes the Rub’ al Khali so interesting? It is the largest sand desert in the world. It covers some 250,000 square miles of the southern Arabian Peninsula. The desert is larger than France and somewhat smaller than Texas.
This vast expanse of sand is home to the lost city of Iram, which is mentioned in the Qur’an, and may have been an important city in the ancient frankincense trade.
The Empty Quarter is the setting for Lovecraft’s story “The Nameless City”, and is also the setting for Demons in the Dunes, Pierce Mostyn’s newest adventure.
Did Lovecraft’s story play any part in the origin of Demons in the Dunes? It did. HPL’s story gave me the idea to set an adventure in the Empty Quarter, with Iram as the focal point.
However, the Nameless City of Lovecraft’s story is clearly not Iram. Consequently, the story line of Demons has no direct influence from Lovecraft. Although it is Lovecraftian to a degree.
Little is known about the actual city of Iram. It may have been located on the frankincense caravan route. Legend has it that it was built by giants to challenge God by creating a paradise on earth greater then God’s paradise. God, of course, destroyed the giants and the city.
Iram is called Iram of the Pillars, but we don’t know why. One Internet source, attributed mystical connections to the city. According to this view, Iram actually occupies several planes of existence, and, in accordance with the mystical position, an alternate reading of the city’s title is Iram of the Old Ones. No self-respecting Cthulhu Mythos aficionado can walk away from that tidbit of info and not have the cogs whirring in his brain!
Out of those seeds, Demons in the Dunes grew. I had great fun writing it. I hope you have great fun reading it.
Comments are always welcome! And until next time, happy reading!
In two weeks, the sixth Pierce Mostyn Paranormal Investigation, Demons in the Dunes, will hit the virtual bookshelves. And the word is that it’s the best Pierce Mostyn thus far. Which has me quite jazzed. I enjoy writing the Pierce Mostyn books and it’s good to know they are getting better and better.
I follow the school of thought that says don’t fully define your characters. Just start with a brief sketch and let them grow from story to story.
In practice, this means the characters may not come across as fully developed in the first book or two. Personally, I’m okay with that. I like to see a series character grow. And if what my advance readers are telling me is true, the characters are growing. Which means I am becoming more and more comfortable with them. And that is a very good thing.
Demons in the Dunes is also a bit different from the other books in the series in that the setting is not in the United States, but in the Empty Quarter of the Arabian Peninsula. There is nothing like an exotic location to spice a read!
For me, one of the most interesting things to watch in the series is the development of Dr. Rafe Bardon. And Demons reveals yet another side of the good doctor that we haven’t seen before. He is truly one enigmatic fellow!
You can find the entire series here. If you become a VIP reader, you’ll get the novelette “The Feeder” as a gift. It’s another rousing paranormal tale of adventure, and it’s not available in stores.
I’ll have more next week, so stay tuned!
Comments are always welcome! And until next time, happy reading!
I’ve had a love affair with Antarctica since I was around 11 or 12. Someone gave my mom a number of National Geographic magazines and one of them contained a map of Antarctica. I devoured the information on that map. And before that Shackleton had become something of a hero for me.
So it’s only natural that I found myself drawn to Lovecraft’s At The Mountains Of Madness. And recently reread the novel for background information as I researched my eighth Pierce Mostyn Paranormal Investigation, which takes Mostyn and friends to the bottom of the world.
Of course today we know there are no massive mountain ranges as Lovecraft described in his book, and there’s no sacred city of the Elder Things nestled in the foothills and valley of the smaller of those great ranges.
That is the stuff of fiction. When an unexplored continent provided plenty of room for the imagination to take flight.
However, one aspect of Lovecraft’s tale is at least partially true: there are indeed freshwater lakes beneath the Antarctic ice sheet. Whether or not they are inhabited by Elder Things and shoggoths remains to be seen.
Of interest, ironically so, the coordinates Lovecraft gave for the Mountains of Madness are not far off from the location of the great sub-glacial Gamburtsev Mountain range, also known as the Ghost Mountains.
The mountain range, however, is not visible. It is entirely below the surface of the ice. Exploration is being carried out by modern technology. What a wonderful world in which we live where we can go where no one has gone before without actually going there!
The Gamburtsev Mountains are the real Mountains of Madness. But will we find the caves and strange cube-like structures that Lovecraft described on the mountains? Will we find on the eastern side, nestled in the foothills, an enormous metropolis preserved by the ice as Pompeii and Herculaneum were preserved by Vesuvius? Will we find a tunnel leading to the sub-glacial lakes, occupied by those blasphemously hideous agglutinations of protoplasmic bubbles?
Who knows? Perhaps Lovecraft was right after all. Dr Rafe Bardon, Director of the Office of Unidentified Phenomena, has his own ideas, and the Russian drilling into and possible contamination of Lake Vostok might have greater consequences of dire import than we could ever imagine, or Lovecraft either, for that matter.
What I do know is that Pierce Mostyn… Wait a minute. Is that a knocking at my door I hear? Let me see who it is. I won’t be long.
As Mr Hawes hasn’t returned, I, his VA, will end the post as he usually does. Hopefully he’ll be back in time for next week’s post.
Comments are always welcome! And until next time (if there is a next time), happy reading!
The insignia of the Office of Unidentified Phenomena
The other week someone asked me about the symbolism behind the emblem of the Office of Unidentified Phenomena (OUP). The fictional agency for which my paranormal investigator Pierce Mostyn works to save America and the world from those things that make big bumps in the night. It’s a good question, because the design wasn’t haphazard.
The creator of the design was none other than Crispian Thurlborn, who is no stranger to you if you are a reader of this blog. He’s a fabulous writer. In addition, he’s a superb book cover designer, andtrailer maker. He designed all of the promo materials I use for the Pierce Mostyn Paranormal Investigation books.
So what does all that stuff on the above emblem mean? Let’s take a look at the symbolism.
The red triangle on which the circle is placed represents the depth of the OUP. It is in the background of our daily lives and it’s reach is very deep. It is behind everything.
The shield covering the eagle’s body represents defense in the air (the stars), on the land (the mountain), and on the sea (the waves). There is also a Lovecraftian dimension to those three aspects in addition to the normal heraldic symbolism. The OUP protects us from all things deep under the sea (where Cthulhu sleeps), in space and beyond (where the Great Old Ones originated), and under the earth (where Tsathoggua sleeps).
The all-seeing eye in the pyramid on the shield symbolizes the ever vigilant nature of the OUP.
The eagle itself is a bird of prey, but has for a very long time symbolized nobility, strength, and bravery. The wings in the displayed position symbolize protection. And the rays, or rayonnee emanating from the eagle’s head symbolize intelligence and enlightenment.
The olive branch and the arrows show that all of the traits are present in both peace and war.
And now to the eagle’s head. Why is it facing to the eagle’s left? If you notice any symbolism which uses an eagle the head is usually turned to the eagle’s right. The right hand symbolizing honor and nobility. At least most of the time.
But what does it mean when the head faces to the left? That is an excellent question. Our word “sinister” comes from the Latin word for left. Hm. Gives one pause to think, doesn’t it?
Does the eagle’s head facing left mean the OUP is a sinister organization, one that actually doesn’t do good? Well, the eagle on the US President’s seal faced left until President Truman changed it to the right. More food for thought.
For the OUP, the left facing eagle symbolizes the fine line the agency walks in protecting us from that of which we aren’t aware. The all-seeing eye, the rays of enlightenment and intelligence, and the sinister facing eagle together imply the danger of the OUP’s mission and methodology and the wisdom needed to thread a very fine needle, or walk a very fine line.
It is a case of fighting fire with fire. Of fighting the forces of darkness with darkness. Of using the two-edged sword which can cut both ways. Fighting evil by frequently having to resort to using evil.
All of this is, of course, perfectly in line with the Lovecraftian base underlying the Pierce Mostyn stories.
The Great Old Ones, while appearing evil to us because they mean the end of the world as we know it, are not intrinsically evil. They simply exist as we exist. They appear evil to us because they are unlike us and appear to be at cross purposes with us. They are aliens, foreigners to our universe. And by nature we tend to feel uncomfortable with what we do not know or understand. But perhaps most damning from our perspective is that we are to them as ants are to us. Nothing. A mere nuisance.
If ants bug us, we exterminate them. The same with the Great Old Ones. To them we are pests.
For Lovecraft, human beings are not the apex of all creation. We are essentially nothing in the face of the great cosmos. We are a highly developed primate, having evolved on a tiny speck of rock and dirt, orbiting a star of no particular significance. Our position in the universe is so infinitesimally tiny, we are in essence insignificant.
Prior to Lovecraft, Nietzsche posited our essential meaninglessness.He cites, in The Birth of Tragedy, the story of Midas and Silenus. Midas asks the god what is the best thing for us. And Silenus answers him by saying that the best thing for us humans is to never be born. Otherwise our best course is to die soon.
Nietzsche goes on to posit that when we gaze into the deep black abyss and come away knowing our insignificance, our meaninglessness, our essential lack of any objective purpose — it is then the words of Silenus come home to us.
However, Nietzsche didn’t leave us in the depths of despair and nihilism. It is why he advocated we must create our own purpose. We are the creators. We are the gods. Not the beings we fashioned in our own image. We must embrace our senses and emotions, we must resort to art to find our own meaning and purpose. If left to our rational nature alone, we will sink into despair. We will go insane.
The Great Old Ones are not rational by our standards, which is perhaps why so many go insane immediately upon seeing them.
Dr Rafe Bardon, the OUP’s director, and Pierce Mostyn have gazed into the abyss and survived. They realize that the eagle facing to the right will not save the planet from the roiling insane chaos (at least by our standards) threatening to over take it.
Only by facing the sinister is there any hope for survival.
Stop by this Friday for the fourth installment of The Medusa Ritual. Lovecraftian adventure coming your way, as Pierce Mostyn and the OUP battle a nemesis hellbent on opening the gate for the Great Old Ones.
Comments are always welcome! And until next time, happy reading!
Reading is my favorite form of entertainment. I enjoy reading over TV and movies. I enjoy it more than boardgames. Although I might actually enjoy eating more than I do reading. The waistline is difficult to ignore.
There is, though, one problem I have as a writer with reading. It takes over my mind. As a result, if I am writing a horror story, problems develop if I start reading mysteries, for example. Suddenly my brain leaves the monsters behind and I’m thinking whodunit. Something of a problem that!
Recently I received a three month Kindle Unlimited trial for 99¢. Unfortunately, it ran over the holidays so I didn’t get as much of an advantage out of it as I would have liked. Nevertheless I did read 7 novels/novellas, 7 short stories, and 1 short story collection. Which means I did get my money back with interest.
Most of the novels I read were mysteries, and therein lay the conflict with my novel writing.
I’m currently at work on Pierce Mostyn #7, but with all those mysteries passing before my eyes my horror novel started looking a little bit like a murder mystery. I’ll undoubtedly have some fixing up to do.
However, don’t take the above as complaining. I’m just saying. Because quite a bit of my KU reading was, in fact, horror related. The short stories were from the Occult Detective Quarterly, Issue #1 (Fall 2016). Six of the seven stories were excellent reads. So good in fact, I’ll probably buy all of the issues. The short story collection was The Abominations of the Nephren-ka and Three More Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos by Mark McLaughlin and Michael Sheehan, Jr. All four of the tales were quite serviceable reads with which to pass a couple of hours.
With the KU trial over (I didn’t renew), I’m now back on my own resources for reading, which includes the works of several indie authors of my acquaintance I wish to promote.
I think it is very important for indie writers to read the books of their fellows. Because we indies are all in the same boat pulling at the same oars. The least we can do to help each other is to buy, read, and review each other’s work.
Over the weekend, I read In Agony Again by Ernestine Marsh. Ms Marsh has to be in the running for the title of Queen of Comedy. She’s that funny.
With the writing of Pierce Mostyn being bent all out of shape due to my recent reading, I have to get it back on track.So for the rest of the month, I’ll be focusing on horror, the supernatural kind.
Aside from the KU reading, I’ve read this year “The Call of Cthulhu” and “The Nameless City” by Lovecraft, and The Horror from the Hills by Frank Belknap Long. Having thus far read only one Clark Ashton Smith Cthulhu Mythos tale, maybe I’ll spend some time with Mr Smith. “The Tale of Satampra Zeiros” may be a very good place to start.
Now to you. What book or books have been in your hand of late? I’d like to hear about them. Especially if the authors are indie writers such as myself.
With over 3000 new books appearing on Amazon each day, that’s a lot of books to sort through. And if we consider that four years ago there were 3 1/2 million ebooks in the Kindle store — that’s a heck of a lot of books to look through for some good ones.
So please share some of your good reads with me, and you can bet I’ll do the same back with you.
Comments are always welcome! And until next time, happy reading!
Pierce Mostyn fighting inter-dimensional beings. Photo from a secret OUP file.
The other week I ran across a magazine called The Occult Detective Quarterly. Since the occult detective is a relatively new interest of mine, I loaded a couple issues onto my iPad for a read.
I’m about halfway through the first issue and I can honestly give the zine a big thumbs up! I hope they get the money they need to publish issues 5 and 6.
The occult detective has a long and venerable history. I outlined a bit of that history in a previous post. I also noted that it was Seabury Quinn’s occult detective, Jules de Grandin, that saved Weird Tales magazine from going under very early in its history.
Today I’d like to focus attention on my own occult, or paranormal, investigator creation: Pierce Mostyn and the Office of Unidentified Phenomena.
I’m a fan of the Cthulhu Mythos, vampires, werewolves, re-animated corpses (whether they be creations of Dr Frankenstein, Herbert West, mummies, or old-fashioned zombies and zuvembies), and, of course, ghosts. Pretty much anything supernatural gets my vote, and even a few things that aren’t exactly supernatural but can be classed as weird.
Pierce Mostyn, paranormal investigator extraordinaire, and the Office of Unidentified Phenomena, led by uber-mysterious Dr Rafe Bardon, are America’s ultra-secret fighters whose mission is to stop and destroy those things it is best for us not to know they exist.
In Nightmare in Agate Bay, Mostyn and his team meet an off-shoot of the Esoteric Order of Dagon in backwater Agate Bay, Minnesota. Which Order was the same mysterious cult that plagued poor Innsmouth. We meet fish people and a shoggoth. Some of our favorite paranormals.
Mostyn’s next adventure, Stairway to Hell, takes him and his team to the subterranean world of K’n-yan. Where we find a super-race of fickle and sadistic beings, who just so happen to be worshippers of Cthulhu and his buddies.
In K’n-yan, while trying to find a way to escape, Mostyn encounters the beautiful and seductive H’tha-dub, who gives him a Faustian choice that could save his team and at the same time destroy his budding romance with team member Dotty Kemper. Duty or love, that is Mostyn’s choice. The choice should be easy. But is it?
We all know that while Cthulhu is a pretty gargantuan bad guy, he isn’t the only monster on the block. In Terror in the Shadows, Mostyn and his team encounter a family that has degenerated beyond the classification of human. A family that has undergone reverse evolution. The classic term for such a being is abhuman. And Mostyn encounters lots of them in the hills of Appalachia. For their part, the abhumans recognize a good protein source when they see one.
And if the monsters of natural degeneration aren’t enough, there’s Van Dyne’s Vampires — the product of modern science and the laboratory. Mostyn and team must face hordes of these lab-cultured demons who’d just as soon chomp your liver as suck your blood.
Evil never rests. After all, if it did, what would we paranormal writers write about? Which brings me to the upcoming Pierce Mostyn paranormal investigation: The Medusa Ritual. As an experiment, I intend to serialize the working draft of this short novel here on the website prior to its publication in book form this summer. But more on the serialized novel and The Medusa Ritual in the next couple weeks.
The first Pierce Mostyn investigation went public a year ago. And in the 12 months since I’ve had great fun getting to know the central gang: Mostyn himself, Dr Dotty Kemper, Willie Lee Baker, DC Jones, Helene Dubreuil, Dr Rafe Bardon, and the newest addition, Kymbra NicAskill.
I encourage you to take a look at my interpretation of the occult detective. You’ll find everything you love about the paranormal and good stories in the Pierce Mostyn Paranormal Investigations. There be monsters here!
Comments are always welcome! And until next time, happy reading!
Logo of the Office of Unidentified PhenomenaShare This!
Last week we took a look at the paranormal phenomenon in literature. The week I want to focus on the occult detective. Or in today’s parlance, the Paranormal Detective.
Edgar Allan Poe created the detective genre with his amateur sleuth, C. Auguste Dupin. It can easily be said that mother and son writing team, E. and H. Heron created the occult detective sub-genre with their Flaxman Low stories.
After Low’s introduction, a steady steam of occult detectives appeared on the literary scene. Some of them are:
Dr John Silence, created by Algernon Blackwood
Thomas Carnacki, created by William Hope Hodgson
Aylmer Vance, created by Alice and Claude Askew
Moris Klaw, created by Sax Rohmer
Jules de Grandin, created by Seabury Quinn
Steve Harrison, created by Robert E Howard
John Thunstone, created by Manly Wade Wellman
Dr Alex Caspian, created by Joseph Payne Brennan
Dirk Gently, created by Douglas Adams
Repairman Jack, created by F. Paul Wilson
The occult detective has also appeared on TV in shows such as Kolchak: The Night Stalker, Penny Dreadful, Twin Peaks, Angel, and, of course, The X-Files.
Twin Peaks and The X-Files gave a little twist to the occult detective genre by having the investigators FBI agents. The government was now involved, one way or the other, in the investigation of supernatural occurrences.
I grew up in the 50s and 60s. The UFO scare and the talk of government cover-ups was news. I remember reading of sightings, or watching reports on TV, along with the usual government “explanation”. I read books on UFOs “proving” their existence. Circumstantial evidence to be sure. But if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck…
Consequently, since writers write mostly about what they know, it was only a matter of time before my Muse gave me Pierce Mostyn and the Federal Office of Unidentified Phenomena. A Federal uber-secret agency whose purpose is to investigate and determine the threat level of those things that go bump in the night, and eliminate them if need be.
And what greater terror can there be, the greatest of those things that go bump in the night, then the Great Cthulhu and his ilk?
Lovecraft, in The Shadow Over Innsmouth, intimated that the Federal government was indeed interested in and sought to cover-up the existence of The Great Old Ones.
Pierce Mostyn and the Office of Unidentified Phenomena are a natural riff on Lovecraft and the government investigations and cover-ups alluded to in Lovecraft’s stories, Twin Peaks, and The X-Files. Along with being more action-oriented than those three predecessors.
Today, if you search Amazon, you’ll quickly see that the current crop of writers use the terms paranormal detective, or paranormal investigator.
The occult and supernatural are out, and the paranormal is in — at least as far as being a category identifier is concerned. So if you’re a writer writing about the occult and supernatural, just call it the paranormal and you should be alright.
Before I go, I do want to shine a spotlight on two excellent paranormal investigator reads. They are Herkimer’s Nose and Tony Price: Confidential (which is all three Tony Price volumes in one book). Richard Schwindt is an amazing storyteller. You won’t regret spending the 3 bucks to get these books.
Comments are always welcome! And until next time, happy reading!
I’m taking a bit of a break in our series Good Books You Probably Never Heard Of to talk about the Paranormal. Mostly because later this month I’ll be publishing the fourth Pierce Mostyn Paranormal Investigation. And I want to share with you some thoughts regarding this category.
Back in the dark ages when I was growing up, we didn’t use the word “paranormal” all that often. We used “supernatural” and “occult”. I’m still inclined to use those words rather than “paranormal”. But I also want to sell books. And if the “in” word is paranormal – then, so be it.
Today, we have paranormal everything. Just key the word paranormal into the Amazon search box. You’ll get paranormal romance, paranormal mystery, paranormal dating agency, paranormal cozy mystery, paranormal police department, paranormal PIs, paranormal reverse harem (what????), and all those shifter romances.
The paranormal, with or without magic, is hot. One of the reasons I started thinking about writing my own paranormal series last year.
A writer basically has two options when it comes to deciding what to write. Either write about what you love. Or learn to love what you write about.
I tried the latter approach a few decades ago with romance novels. What I learned was I was not going to learn to love writing about love. In fact, I hated it! And subsequently gave up on the idea.
Today, I write what I like or love to read. And that works for me.
I enjoy writing. And I make some sales and get some KU page reads along the way. Which is also nice.
I probably won’t get rich from writing because what I like to read isn’t what is hot. I’ve accepted that. But I haven’t yet thrown in the towel on the idea that I can make some kind of livable income from writing. Which for me is basically a nice supplement to my retirement income. After all there are lots of writers who aren’t on the bestseller lists who make some decent money from their pens.
The idea for Pierce Mostyn came about while I was watching the first season of The X-Files on Netflix. The thought came to me what if there was an uber-secret government agency whose mission was to save us from… From what? I like the Cthulhu Mythos, so why not those bad guys?
The more I thought about it, the more I decided the concept worked for me. And thus Pierce Mostyn and the Office of Unidentified Phenomena was born.
My first inclination was to call the investigations “occult”. Then I told myself, No, they have to be “Paranormal” if you want a chance to make some coin. And so the series became the Pierce Mostyn Paranormal Investigations.
Occult and supernatural literature – or paranormal in today’s parlance – has been popular from the beginning. Stories of monsters, demons, and ghosts. And we are still telling these stories today.
It’s great fun working in an ancient storytelling tradition with a modern twist.
If you haven’t read the Pierce Mostyn series, I urge you to give them a try. I’m quite proud of the books. As one reviewer noted, they’re, “…entertaining and action packed.” And if you subscribe to Kindle Unlimited, you don’t have to pay a cent. Such a deal!
Comments are always welcome! And until next time, happy reading!
I have mixed feelings about having most of my books exclusive on Amazon. But the one thing that is difficult to argue against is making more money. All of my books except for The Rocheport Saga are exclusive to Amazon. Hopefully one day soon I’ll be able to figure out how to make as much money going wide as I do now being exclusive to Amazon. But until that day, exclusive it is.
If you have an iPad, you can get the Kindle app to augment iBooks. That’s what I’ve done. There are also ways to read Kindle books on Nook and Kobo devices. A little Internet research will show you how to do that.
Last week I gave you a sneak peek from chapter 1 of Terror in the Shadows. This week’s peek is from Chapter 6. Enjoy!
***
When the big black SUV pulled into the lot, Mostyn and Kemper saw a big old Pontiac a short distance away, not far from the tree line. The car was bouncing, the squeak of the springs just barely audible.
“Looks like someone’s going for a ride,” Mostyn said.
“Idiots.”
“What? You never did that, Kemper?”
“A car? You’ve got to be kidding?”
“Nope.”
“Forget it. Now what?”
Mostyn put the SUV in park and shut off the engine. “Let’s go for a walk.”
They exited the vehicle, flashlights in hand. The old Pontiac stopped bouncing.
“I guess he scored,” Kemper said.
“Hope they don’t regret it.”
“Now who’s the cynic.”
“Just saying. Babies you know.”
“Gotta point there, Mostyn.”
“This way, Kemper.”
Mostyn cut across the lot on a path that would give the occupants of the Pontiac their space. Kemper was next to him. Their flashlight beams illuminated the asphalt, and when the asphalt ended, the short strip of grass before the woods.
Just before the trees, Kemper hesitated. “Awfully dark in there.”
“That it is. And there may or may not be a bogeyman in there.”
“Yeah, right.”
Mostyn and Kemper carefully picked their way into the woods. Behind them, in the east, a golden moon began coming up over the treetops. They heard the Pontiac start and drive out of the lot.
“Bet they’re wondering whose SUV that is,” Mostyn said.
“Probably scared shitless someone was spying on them and will tell their parents.”
Mostyn chuckled. “Probably.”
Out of the darkness a rock knocked Kemper’s flashlight out of her hand. Mostyn turned his off and they dropped to the ground. All around them they heard grunting and feral sounds. Neither one said a word. Whatever was making the sounds, and there had to be several of them, they were obviously looking for Mostyn and Kemper.
Mostyn touched his pistol to Kemper’s hand and then touched her hand with one finger, followed by a second, and then a third.
Kemper wrote “OK” with her finger on Mostyn’s hand and pulled her pistol out of the fanny pack.
Mostyn tapped Kemper’s hand once, twice, three times. They jumped up, and fired into the darkness.
Several rocks came flying in their direction and Mostyn grunted when one connected with his thigh. And then all was quiet.
Mostyn turned on his flashlight and panned the light and his pistol in a circle around them. Nothing. There was nothing but trees and darkness beyond the flashlight beam.
He squatted down and played the beam of light around until he found Kemper’s flashlight. He picked it up and tried the switch.
“Must’ve broken the bulb.”
He heard Kemper say, “Let’s go.”
He stood and they made their way out of the woods. In the middle of the parking lot, Kemper suddenly stopped.
“What is it, Dot?”
“You know those sounds they were making?”
“A lot of grunts.
“Some were. But most of them…?” She paused, her voice tinged with fear, and turned to face Mostyn.
“Go on.”
“They followed the pattern of speech.”
***
I hope you enjoyed the snippet. Comments are always welcome! And, until next time, happy reading!
The third Pierce Mostyn Paranormal Investigation — Terror in the Shadows — goes live next week. And today I thought I’d give you a sneak peek. Whet your appetite, so to speak.
Terror in the Shadows draws inspiration from the world HP Lovecraft created for his story “The Lurking Fear”. And as I explained last week, Lovecraft utilized the American Gothic fiction theme of the abhuman for the basis of his story.
The term “abhuman” was coined by William Hope Hodgson in his Carnacki stories, among others. The idea itself growing out of Darwinism. If we came from beasts, how are we not beasts? What is it that makes us human? And can we return to the bestial? Or maybe we simply are beasts hiding behind a veneer of civility.
Today’s sneak peek is from chapter 1 of Terror in the Shadows. Enjoy!
***
Mostyn looked out the window. The country through which they were driving could be described as nothing less than idyllic. Yet in all of the United States there are areas no more remote or unknown than parts of Appalachia. In spite of the relatively low height of the mountains, the region possesses some of the most rugged and nearly inaccessible terrain on earth.
From the beauty of the passing scenery, Mostyn once again turned his gaze back to the report. From the Catskills to Georgia, the same occurrences of cannibalism and human carnage. As abruptly as the Georgia horror had begun, in the 1940s, it had ended, news reaching the Federal government too late for war-stretched agencies to do anything about it. Then thirty years later, in the same area, bizarre tales of cannibalism and of the inhabitants of several small communities being torn apart on dark, storm tormented nights. Only blood and body parts being found in the morning.
And once again, as abruptly as the atrocities began, they ceased, news reaching Federal ears too late for any kind of government intervention. These accounts, along with many others, were passed on to the OUP when it was created. This time, however, word reached Doctor Bardon’s ears almost before it had reached the media. And when it did, Doctor Bardon jumped on it.
Mostyn read about the three reported incidents that had occurred so far this year in West Virginia, the four that had occurred last year, and the one the year before that. Brutal murders. Evidence of cannibalism. Vague reports of hairy, beast-like creatures that walked upright with an oddly human gait.
Around him were the sounds of Baker’s camera, Kemper’s and Cashel’s discussion, and Jones softly singing some ‘80s song. Somewhere out there, in the lush greenery of the hills they were passing through, was a hidden horror, a lurking fear that was terrorizing the people in the vicinity of the hamlet called Heirloom, West Virginia.
Four days ago, in the middle of a wild nighttime thunderstorm, was the most recent occurrence. In the little unincorporated village of Shiloh, located several miles to the southeast of Heirloom, a witness reported seeing at least half a dozen shapes, “things” the witness had called them, come out of the dense forest. That’s all the person saw because he’d found his missing dog and was on his way home.
The next day, however, the entire community quickly became aware of the disaster that had struck in the night. The Ardilla and Bosk families had been murdered in their sleep and eaten. Raw. The perpetrators showed no concern about hiding the dead or of concealing evidence. The county sheriff got numerous fingerprints, handprints, and casts of bare feet. Samples of hair were also collected. The forensic analysis concluded the hair was human, as well as the teeth marks on the bones.
And that’s when Doctor Bardon stepped in and claimed jurisdiction. Mostyn looked at Bardon’s small neat script and read his conclusion:
The incidents in the Catskills and those that occurred in Georgia in the 1940s and 1970s are too similar to these current incidents to ignore. Your mission is to determine the source, assess the danger level, and take appropriate action to eliminate the threat, if a threat exists, to the United States of America.
Mostyn’s gaze returned to the scenery outside his window. Somewhere out there was a horror that had been quietly at work for nearly a hundred years. Perhaps more. A horror hidden in the shadows of this beautiful paradise.
***
I hope you enjoyed the snippet. Comments are always welcome, and until next time — happy reading!
