Wednesday, July 1, 2015

Cover Reveal and Excerpt for DARKNESS RISING



My latest book, DARKNESS RISING, is a blood-tingling revenge story with a supernatural twist. The novella releases as an eBook on Amazon and other online bookstores September 1st. Below is a description of the book along with a sneak peek of how the book begins.


It’s all fun and games until...

Marty Weaver, an emotionally scarred poet, has been bullied his entire life. When he drives out to the lake to tell an old friend that he’s fallen in love with a girl named Jennifer, Marty encounters three sadistic killers who have some twisted games in store for him. But Marty has dark secrets of his own buried deep inside him. And tonight, when all the pain from the past is triggered, when those secrets are revealed, blood will flow and hell will rise.

-----------------------
“From the first page I was hooked and couldn't read fast enough. Moreland takes a wicked revenge tale and supes it up, and then when you think things are resolved and you wonder where he's going with it, he delivers the goods. Filled with brutal violence, great prose, nasty characters and ones you root for, Darkness Rising is a must read!!!!

--David Bernstein, author of Goblins and Witch Island
-----------------------
Here’s an excerpt from the book:
Prologue
Deep in the Oregon woods, the lake watched in silence as the woman crawled across the muddy banks, dragging her wounded legs. A switchblade jutted from the back of one thigh. Moonlight glinted off the exposed bone of her hip. Hair, caked with blood and dirt, clung to the woman’s face as she clawed her way into the shallow water. She found her husband, or what was left of him, floating facedown near the shore. Hugging his butchered torso, she wailed, an animal cry that echoed across the valley. A flock of ducks took flight. Behind the mutilated couple stood the killer with the white rabbit mask, head cocked, a bloody machete resting on one shoulder. Then two more joined the rabbit, a toad and weasel, both taller, their clothes covered in dark stains. The three masked killers admired their blood work. The frantic woman released her husband’s body and attempted to swim away, flailing her arms, but Toad and Weasel waded in after her and brought her screaming back to shore. Then Weasel picked up the video camera and began filming again. White Rabbit continued torturing the woman. Then Toad had his fun. At dawn, the woman’s screams finally ended. The lake watched in silence as the three animals danced around her corpse, then slipped into the forest.

-----------------------

The world had always been a cruel place for Marty Weaver. His scars were many and deep. Growing up, his teachers and various foster parents had labeled him autistic, a problem child, emotionally disturbed, while the kids at the foster homes and at school called him names—nerd, wimp, dweeb, freak and worse. He seemed to walk through life with a sign that read “bully me”, even though what he wanted most was a circle of friends and family to love and love him back. 

His best friends were dead poets―Yates, Hawthorne, Keats, Byron, Frost and Poe, to name a few. They taught Marty how to pour the burdens of his soul into poetry. With each poem he wrote and read to the lake, he peeled back a layer of scar tissue and felt a sense of hope that he might one day become a man others could love, maybe even a man who could learn to love himself.

Tonight was a special night. Every full moon, in a tradition he had started as a teenager, Marty did two things. First, he visited the cemetery and put fresh flowers on his mother’s grave. Then he drove along the wooded back roads that carved between the Blue Mountains to read his latest poems to the lake. Writing poetry helped him deal with all his pent-up emotions. It had helped him through his roughest times―the loss of his parents when he was nine, all the hell he had gone through bouncing between foster homes, and the rocky period that followed when he turned eighteen and ventured out on his own.

He parked in the lot overlooking the water, eager to share more about this radiant angel who had entered his life. As he climbed out of his car, he noticed a van parked in the shadows of a tree with looming branches. It looked like one of those custom vans with flames painted down the sides. 

This gravel lot, on the farthest side of the lake, was always empty. Most people didn’t know this place existed because it wasn’t on the campground maps and it took several dirt roads to get here. He came to this spot because it was the special place his parents used to bring him to when he was a boy. The lot and beach were completely hidden by dense woods. Across the water was the most majestic view of pines and mountains. Occasionally a boat passed by, but mostly this inlet was quiet and still. His mother had called their secret spot “the Magic Cove”. She loved to swim here, sunbathe, and take him exploring in the forest.

His father liked this cove because the fishing was good. He taught Marty how to work a rod and reel, gut a fish with a knife, skin it and flay it. Mornings were always spent with the two of them fishing for whatever the lake offered that day, while Marty’s mother read her books or did yoga. Then they’d have a picnic and cook their fish over a campfire. Those were the best days of Marty’s childhood, before The Bad Thing happened.

That someone had discovered his private cove made Marty feel invaded. He watched the van for a moment, but it looked dark and empty. Maybe someone had abandoned it there. Or some hikers had gone on a long trek around the lake. He didn’t see anyone, so he didn’t concern himself too much about the van.

He walked down the hill to the water’s edge with his journal. The moon’s glow cast his shadow across the lake’s glassy surface.

“Hello, old friend. It’s been a few weeks. I’ve got some new poems for you.” 

He opened his journal, feeling the worn leather cover against his palms. The oversized book, filled with hundreds of pages of his handwriting and drawings, was a memoir of his inner world from childhood to now. The stiff, heavily inked pages crinkled as he turned them, and that sound always made him feel a sense of nostalgia. 

The book had been a gift from his mother on his eighth birthday. Across these pages he had written countless poems, short stories, and glued-together collages of magazine pictures of things he wanted to one day own or become. At age eight, he had wanted to be Batman and pasted cutouts from a comic book. At age nine, it was Aquaman. As he got older, the pictures changed from superheroes to cars, to girls, to the things he now aspired to have as an adult, like an education, professorship, someday a wife. 

Next to a pamphlet of St. Germaine College was a photo of him and Jennifer at the campus gardens where they had taken a selfie standing in front of a fountain. The last fifty or so pages were filled with his love poems, some so sappy he felt embarrassed to read them. Most of his poems were amateurish musings, while every now and then he wrote something he was proud of. The only one who had ever heard any of his writings was the lake.

Marty held the big book open like a preacher about to give a sermon, only his congregation was the frogs and the reeds and the dark water. “I’ve been seeing Jennifer around campus more and more. Today she gave me a gift and kissed me on the cheek. The way she acts around me sometimes, I…I think I might actually have a shot with her.” He felt his heart expand just thinking about her. “Her beauty has awakened something in me that I’ve never felt for anyone. I can’t stop writing about her. I’ve got at least a dozen new ones. This first one’s still a work in progress. The beats aren’t quite right, but this is what I’ve written so far.”

He read the poem aloud:

In her eyes, fireflies
Sparks from my caress
On our faces, warm smiles
Cannons in our chests

Time's first gentle touch
Feathers along our flesh
Tall grass all around us
We whisper, touch, undress

Butterflies in our heads
Opening wings together
Taking flight in purple skies
Evaporating like the weather

The sound of hands clapping startled Marty.

“That is the most beautiful piece of shit I ever heard,” a man’s voice echoed off the water, followed by laughter.

Marty turned to see three silhouettes walking along the shoreline towards him.



-----------------------

“Just finished Darkness Rising and still reeling from the conflict, terror, horror and emotional rollercoaster that Brian Moreland has weaved so magically into this novella . . . Weaving its superbly crafted way through demons, vengeance and an indomitable spirit, this is a real winner. 5 star horror all the way!

--Catherine Cavendish, author of Dark Avenging Angel and The Pendle’s Curse
Darkness Rising is now available for pre-order: