The Darkening Dream by Andy Gavin Free on Kindle

FREE Two Days Only: A Vampire Novel with Actual Bite!



As the modern world establishes itself and pushes the supernatural into the shadows, the supernatural fights back.

The Darkening Dream is a chilling new dark fantasy novel by Andy Gavin, creator of Crash Bandicoot and Jak & Daxter, that has received rave reviews on Amazon and Goodreads and is FREE for two days only on Amazon Kindle (February 7th to 8th)! Download your FREE copy here.

Long-time readers of dark historical fantasy (Tim Powers, Guy Gavriel Kay, Katherine Kurtz) will appreciate the weaving together of mythology, occult, and religion, while younger readers and fans of HBO dramas (True Blood, Carnivàle) or urban fantasy (Laurell K. Hamilton, Kim Harrison, Jim Butcher) will be drawn to the twisted imagination, graphic action, and romantic tension.

About The Darkening Dream

Even as the modern world pushes the supernatural aside in favor of science and steel, the old ways remain. God, demon, monster, and sorcerer alike plot to regain what was theirs.

1913, Salem, Massachusetts - – Sarah Engelmann’s life is full of friends, books, and avoiding the pressure to choose a husband, until an ominous vision and the haunting call of an otherworldly trumpet shake her. When she stumbles across a gruesome corpse, she fears that her vision was more of a premonition. And when she sees the murdered boy moving through the crowd at an amusement park, Sarah is thrust into a dark battle she does not understand.

With the help of Alex, an attractive Greek immigrant who knows a startling amount about the undead, Sarah sets out to uncover the truth. Their quest takes them to the factory mills of Salem, on a midnight boat ride to spy on an eerie coastal lair, and back, unexpectedly, to their own homes. What can Alex’s elderly, vampire-hunting grandfather and Sarah’s own rabbi father tell them? And what do Sarah’s continuing visions reveal?

No less than Gabriel’s Trumpet, the tool that will announce the End of Days, is at stake, and the forces that have banded to recover it include a 900 year-old vampire, a trio of disgruntled Egyptian gods, and a demon-loving Puritan minister. At the center of this swirling cast is Sarah, who must fight a millennia-old battle against unspeakable forces, knowing the ultimate prize might be her very soul.

The Reviews Are In

"A vampire novel with actual bite." ~The Kirkus Reviews

"Mr. Gavin has brought something refreshingly new to a genre now suffused with poorly-concealed bodice-rippers which have more in common with Fabio than Bram Stoker: depth. His big baddies are scary, not romantic interests, and the added religious lore is complex and engaging. Don't expect another Twilight -- the story can get downright creepy, so be prepared for a return to the old horror sensibilities of supernatural fiction." ~Amazon Review

"With Mr. Gavin's video-game pedigree, I was expecting something aimed squarely at the 18-25 year old fanboy contingent; what I got in The Darkening Dream was something wholly unexpected: A period novel with a female protagonist, a crash-course on Judaism in the colonial years, and multi-layered series of plot arcs featuring a crazy cast of natural and supernatural characters populating 18th Century Colonial America." ~Amazon Review

"…A perfect blend of mystery, magic and myth. A grown-up Grimm's fairy tale...emphasis on grim." ~Amazon Review

Read the first two sample chapters here.

Get your FREE copy of The Darkening Dream for two days only on Amazon here.

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Cover links can be found at:

http://all-things-andy-gavin.com/the-darkening-dream/cover

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http://all-things-andy-gavin.com/the-darkening-dream/cover-small

Book Review: Twitch by Thomas Scopel

Twitch
by Thomas Scopel
July 14, 2011
$0.99 (Kindle)
Review copy received from the author in exchange for an honest review

Twitch is the story of a carnival owner, McB, who finds a strange creature on the back of a trailer. Because the guy is himself an orphan and still bitter about the fact that no one picked him for adoption, he has a soft spot for misfits, who he likes to take in. Only this misfit is not quite human—not in the traditional sense anyway. Where most people would see a deformed, misshapen creature, he sees a poor child that he wants to take care of.

In the next section, we switch points of view to a morbidly obese woman, Matilda, who meets a particularly gruesome end, which leads to the other carnival “attractions,” shall we say, remarking on the new arrival in their midst, nicknamed Twitch, and they express their genuine fears at his presence, claiming that he caused Matilda’s death somehow. Unfortunately, Matilda isn’t the only customer at the carnival who gets more than bargained for.

Eventually, Twitch finds himself caught in front of a fire that he can’t get away from, and his owner, McB, desperately makes every valiant effort to preserve him, but ultimately and tragically (in his view) fails.

The second part of the novella switches to the past, specifically October 1692 when we meet a woman called Abigail who is pregnant but also in a courtroom where judges are preparing to sentence her to death for being a witch. She’s more of a healer than a sorceress, but the reverend William Morris wants to prove otherwise. As so many fictional characters have done in the past, he reverts to scare tactics to convince the judges to pronounce her guilty, and it works despite the fact that she has helped her husband, a doctor, cure countless patients using her gift.

Hubby is sentenced to death, but because Abigail is pregnant, her fate is to be imprisoned, deliver the baby, then be burned at the stake. But there’s more. Reverend Morris isn’t as much of a holy man as he seems, and as it turns out, he raped her, leading to her pregnancy, but her husband, the good doctor, assumed the child was his.

While in prison, Reverend Morris brings the starving Abigail a pie laced with arsenic, but before she can purge what she’s consumed out of her body, it goes down and as a result, her baby comes out deformed (so much so that the midwife refuses to touch it).

This section explains how Twitch came to be and that he has been alive for centuries—before she died, her mother passed on her abilities to him, but clearly, he got the bad ones or the ones used for doing harm. It doesn’t take long before he starts killing other kids and the monks who are taking care of him try to get rid of him. A travelling sideshow owner nabs the freak and off he goes, doomed to spend the rest of his life as a carnival attraction. In the 1970s, the creature also went to see a shrink in order to determine his age, but to no avail. And so, we learn the tragic origins of a Cujo-esque accident of a monster who should never have been born.

It’s an interesting little novella, and if you’re into horror fiction featuring sideshow freaks, you’ll enjoy this one.

--Darkeva

Book Review: Whitechapel Road by Wayne Mallows

White Chapel Road
by Wayne Mallows

Review by Darkeva
$24.95
Available on Amazon

Whitechapel Road is a vampire novel by Niagara Falls resident Wayne Mallows that goes back to the 1800s and Victorian England in the good old days of Jack the Ripper, but in this version, vampires abound. Specifically, a female vampire named Mary who uses the patriarchal and often misogynistic belief systems of the times to her advantage as she runs amok in London, taunting the clueless police, but more than anyone, she taunts a man named Aremis who was engaged to a woman he thought was a simple, obedient (and human) sort of gal, but turns out that thanks to the old switcheroo, he gets bitten and turns into one of the foul creatures himself. 

What’s unique about this tale isn’t so much the depictions of vampirism or even the notion of Victorian vampires, but it’s the element of mixing Jack the Ripper in there, and proposing the idea that perhaps our favourite Ripper was indeed not only a woman (an idea which has been explored in other novels and films), but also that she was of the fanged persuasion, which is new to me.

The story is written in an easy-to-follow style, and the plot will keep you turning the pages. Any fan of vampires, Jack the Ripper, Victorian fiction, or all of the above will definitely enjoy Mallows’ offering, which has great historical details and reveals the point of view of Aremis’ caring and kind-hearted sister, who gets the epistolary treatment in the form of diary entries written at the beginning of most of the beginning chapters, then we don’t hear from her again until the very end. 

This is the perfect kind of thing to read as we’re approaching Halloween (then again, isn’t all horror? ;-)) but this book especially will give you a feeling that you’ve got a unique vampire novel in your hands, and will offer you some much-needed fresh blood ;-) (couldn’t resist)

-Darkeva-