Upcoming Book

This is a tentative cover for my newest suspense/horror novel, COLOR THEM GONE.

Andy Coffrey is excited. He has freed himself of the stressful, often depressing constraints of ambulance work in the city, and accepted a job as a medic in the oil fields of Northern Canada. What he doesn’t know is that this first tour is likely to be his last.

From the first plane ride in, he is plagued by frustrating equipment failures, unsettling dreams and increasingly bizarre encounters with the people around him. By the time he realizes there is something seriously wrong with the place, the attacks on him and his new colleagues turn deadly, and everyone finds they are in the middle of a war. They must fight for survival against an ancient enemy that can tear into men’s minds as easily as they tear into flesh; creatures driven by millennia of hate to murder and wreak devastation among the human intruders on their lands.

Andy and his friends have to fight, not only for themselves, but possibly for Humanity in an environment that is as deadly to them as their enemy. But how can you fight against beings that are almost invisible, and can bend men’s minds to their will and manipulate dead flesh like shadowy puppeteers?

You can’t. Sometimes all you can do is run.

This book was an easier story to get down, as its inspiration comes from my own time working air-ambulance up north in the early ’80s. Many of the bizarre situations Andy experiences come from my own time there (though I didn’t meet too many monsters). The names have been changed to protect the innocent, blah, blah, blah, but a lot of the strangeness (and strange people) he encounters I experienced myself.

Writers don’t always write what they know but when they do it most often results in their best stories. I love all the characters and tales I create but I confess to perhaps putting more of myself (as I was then) into Andy and his adventure in the strange, terrifying new world he discovers, and I feel more of a closeness to this book than maybe some of my others. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

I’m not sure whether I should wait for traditional publishing on this one or not. Even with a track record now it’s not always a smooth, rapid path from finished book to public release, Agents, editors and distributors slow things down a lot – but with good reason, obviously. The books we get off our shelves are good reads because they’ve passed through so many discriminating hands before ours. The alternative is self-publishing – either completely “self”, as my old school classmate Lorna Carleton does with her Dragon Series books, or a hybrid approach using a platform like Amazon, as I do, or an Indie niche publisher like HellBound Books who released my NOODLES book in 2021.

It’s a poser alright but I’ll let you know when COLOR THEM GONE is released.