Cyber Monday (November 29) is just around the corner. My latest novel eBook, “The Acquaintance” will be available for download on that day. But you can pre-order it now! (Hint: Click the Pic!)

It’s a short novel, filled with ghostly delights and other supernatural phenomenon. It draws upon elements that make up the genre Weird Fiction. Though H.P. Lovecraft is most associated with this genre, this novel is perhaps more similar to the works of Algernon Blackwood. It takes place in the late autumn/early winter in a woodsy setting, with creepy things hiding among the trees and roaming about upon the fallen leaves and snow.  If offers a fresh imagination of a soul’s journey when discharged from the body upon death.

Here be some sample paragraphs:

Days will pass and it doesn’t matter where they choose to go.  These days, “where” happens to be nowhere, smack dab in the middle of the remote. This is by design, of course. The rustic, two-story house stands tall, watching over its surrounding space with protective intentions. Taller than an average house, but not tall enough to see beyond the trees of the forest’s perimeter. It is the trees’ job to guard against any unwelcome outsiders. It is the house’s job to provide a comfortable spread for its sole occupant. With large picture windows, it lets this occupant see out into the acres of grassy fields that stretch between the house and the circling forest.  Jonah Dalton, the occupant, could stand watch from inside the sitting room, looking out, making sure.

These days arrive and depart in a place far beyond the cities or towns. There are no roads connecting to any highway exit ramps that will lead to this house.  It is just out there in Nowhere, USA. Never mind the state. The outlines on a map that signify a state’s boundaries would only get lost out here. All this to make sure no one can find Jonah Dalton.

It is quite cold these days. Autumn still has a few weeks to go before she goes to sleep. She has made her bed of leaves across Jonah’s fields. But her current wakefulness does not ward off the cooler temperatures or even snow.  Depending on the given day, Jonah will either see snow or leaves on the ground. There’s always a covering, isn’t there?  Jonah’s greener pasture days are long behind him, if he ever had such greenery. If he did, those were “those days.” These are “these days.”

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Strange days, these days. Dangerous days. Deadly days. Let’s explore some of these days in more depth. We’ll begin two weeks after Jonah moved into the house. He had been disturbed by other things in his new environment before then, but what he saw outside his window one particular morning brought forth a turning of what had been a gradually increasing sense of unease into an exponentially heightening recognition of his own terrorized state of mind.   Let’s call this morning Day 1.