Welcome to My Nightmare

I think you're going to like it...

Throughout my life I’ve been a big fan of horror and other speculative fiction (sci fi, fantasy, etc.) I was that kid reading Stephen King way before it was age-appropriate but, hey, at least I was reading, right! No negative side effects at all (twitch).

Ever since then I’ve wanted to write fiction myself…not the kind of high-brow frou-frou stuff people pretend to read then fawn over at dinner parties, but the kind of raw terror that will chill your bones. I’ve had a bit of luck…got a novel published (Suicide Kings, definitely look for it on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or whereever you buy books) as well as some short fiction in a variety of online magazines.

I find I am most energized about writing when I know people are reading…so I’d like to try this experiment. I’ve written Secrets of Grimoire Manor, a book of gothic horror, content appropriate for young adults on up. I hope it will be part of a series. So I’m going to release the first book here on Substack. My thought is…fans will read the first book and, once that’s done, we’ll have a bit of fun together working out the second and later books. In other words, the series will be shaped, at least in part, by what fans want to see, more or less in real time.

Secrets of Grimoire Manor will follow the adventures of Nevine Turner, a fourteen-year-old girl who is forced to live in a haunted orphanage. As per the “dust jacket”:

At fourteen, Nevine Turner thought foster care was the worst thing in the world, but she learned better when she was sent to the Grimoire Manor for Orphaned Girls.  In The Secrets of Grimoire Manor, Nevine discovers that Grimoire Manor is filled with cranky teachers, abandoned attics and four generations worth of anguished and tortured Grimoire family souls haunting their former home.  Nevine is barely able to settle in before she is mysteriously whisked to the city of Prague in the year 1888.  There she is saved from a murderous ghoul by Xanthae Halruaa, an eccentric physicist and ghost-hunter.  From Xanthae, Nevine learns the trade of ghost-hunting.  Together they work out the secrets of the haunting of Grimoire Manor, the Ghoul of Prague, and the mysterious connections between the two that force Nevine to flip between Grimoire Manor and Prague when she sleeps.

My plan is to start with some freebies…a few short stories to whet your appetite. Some of these will be more adult oriented (read: R-rated), and some more appropriate for younger audiences (PG-13 mainly). I’ll have some age ratings on there for wary parnts. My plan is to start with those free ones for a bit, hopefully build some interest, and cap that with the first chapter of Secrets of Grimoire Manor to really get folks excited. Then, as I have a kid on the cusp of college, we’ll switch the rest of the book to subscribers-only. I’ll keep the subscription price as minimal as possible so it won’t feel like you’re paying more than for an actual book. But the hope, too, is to build a community around it and we can have a bit of fun shaping future installments…though I’ll always have twists and surprises in mind of my own!

I hope to keep to a weekly schedule with this. Please consider signing up for the free subscription for now to have a look. And if this sounds like it might be interesting for any readers you know (figure late elementary on) , please share this with them.

Happy dreams…for now…