October

(Flame Tree Press — October 8, 2024)

Readers of Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes and All Hallows by Christopher Golden will love this one!

In 1970, four boys on the cusp of becoming teenagers notice strange events occurring in Maplewood, NH, timed with the late-night arrival of an old magician who has taken up residence in a boarding house in their neighborhood where one of the tenants is a reclusive pulp horror writer.

The writer’s fears have kept him from venturing outside in over forty years, fears linked to the magician’s previous visit. As children go missing in town, the four boys try to piece together seemingly unrelated phenomena and realize dark forces are at work, but no one will believe them.

Flame Tree Press is the imprint of long-standing independent Flame Tree Publishing, dedicated to full-length original fiction in the horror and suspense, science fiction & fantasy, and crime / mystery / thriller categories. The list brings together fantastic new authors and the more established; the award winners, and exciting, original voices. You can learn more about Flame Tree Press at www.flametreepress.com and connect on social media @FlameTreePress ...

Shadow Flicker

(Flame Tree Press — March 29, 2022)

Investigator Oscar Basaran travels to Kidney Island off the coast of Maine to document the negative effects of shadow flicker from wind turbines on residents living near the windmills, but is unprepared for what he encounters from the islanders. Oscar’s research shows that sleep deprivation, light deficiency and ringing headaches brought on by the noise and constant strobe-like effect of the sun filtered through the spinning blades of the turbines brings on hallucinatory episodes for the closest neighbors to the machines.

Melody Larson’s elderly father nearly chokes to death after stuffing dandelion heads into his mouth. The Granberrys’ pregnant cow repeatedly runs headlong into a fence post. Tatum Gallagher mourns her young son who vanished more than a year ago, presumed swept out to sea by a wave while fishing on the rocky shore, but several people claim to see him appear only in the glimmer of the shadow flicker.

Aerosource, the energy corporation that owns the turbines, hired Oscar to investigate the neighbors’ claims, but the insurance agent shows no allegiance to the conglomerate, especially after learning a previous employee sent to the island a year before has disappeared without a trace. When Oscar meets former island school science teacher Norris Squires, fired for teaching his students about the harmful effects of shadow flicker, he learns a theory regarding Aerosource that sounds too preposterous to believe.

While it seems the shadow flicker effect has driven some of the island’s animals crazy, is it possible it’s caused an even worse mental breakdown among the human inhabitants? Or is something more nefarious at work on the island? As Oscar’s investigation deepens, he discovers the turbines create an unexpected phenomena kept secret by a select group of people on Kidney Island who have made a scientific breakthrough and attempt to harness its dark power.

Flame Tree Press is the imprint of long-standing independent Flame Tree Publishing, dedicated to full-length original fiction in the horror and suspense, science fiction & fantasy, and crime / mystery / thriller categories. The list brings together fantastic new authors and the more established; the award winners, and exciting, original voices. You can learn more about Flame Tree Press at www.flametreepress.com and connect on social media @FlameTreePress ...

Snowball

(Flame Tree Press — 2020)

A group of motorists become stranded on a lonely stretch of highway during a Christmas Eve blizzard and fight for survival against an unnatural force in the storm. The gathered survivors realize a tenuous connection among them means it may not be a coincidence that they all ended up on this highway.

An attempt to seek help leads a few of the travelers to a house in the woods where a twisted toymaker with a mystical snow globe is hell bent on playing deadly games with a group of people just trying to get home for the holidays.

Loonies

(JournalStone — 2015)

Smokey Hollow is a quiet town, but all that changes when Brian Keays moves in and discovers a locked steamer trunk in the attic of his home.

A suspicious fire destroys a mental asylum, but there is no sign of any of its inhabitants. Victims are found dead with a pillowcase over their heads, the same method used in an unsolved series of murders, committed over fifty years ago.

Brian tries to piece together the connection to the trunk and its grisly contents, his investigation aided by anonymous notes. He follows the trail from a ventriloquist firefighter whose dummy knows more than its puppeteer, to a Somnambulist whose pockets contain clues, and to a Knackerman who disposes of animal carcasses but keeps a container with its own mysterious contents.

Death is everywhere, but answers are hard to come by ...

Jokers Club

(JournalStone — 2011)

Diagnosed with a brain tumor, Geoffrey returns to his hometown for a reunion of the Jokers Club (his childhood gang) with the hopes of unearthing the imagination he held in his youth. Upon arriving, he discovers the creative juices that drove his writing many years ago surround him: the tombstone salesman who chisels out names of the dead, the far-sighted barber with the bloodstained smock and the reclusive Tin Man, just to name a few.

Unfortunately Geoffrey's tumor quickly worsens, bringing on blackouts and hallucinations where he encounters the spectral figure of a court jester who had been his muse as a child. The jester inspires Geoffrey's work on his manuscript, fueling his writing at a ferocious pace. The dead and the living co-exist in the pages of Geoffrey's story, in a town where time seems to be frozen in a past that still haunts the present.

When one of the gang is found dead it rattles not only his group of friends, but everyone begins to look at each other as possible suspects. Will the pounding growth in Geoffrey's head be held at bay long enough for him to discover who is targeting his friends, or will the pages in his unfinished novel rewrite history?