(Dark Arts Books)
2017
A new glimpse into the sinister world of NightWhere!
“FIELD OF FLESH,” my NightWhere tie-in novelette, is finally available as a standalone e-book with its own cover! (Click the cover at right to see a larger version of the art.)
Field of Flesh and NightWhere, the original novel, are both just 99 cents on Amazon this week to celebrate the new release!
The story leading to this release goes back quite awhile. Four years ago, in the spring of 2013, my novel NightWhere was a finalist for the Bram Stoker Award for Best Horror Novel. I thought at that time about other stories I could write in the “NightWhere world,” including another novel centered around Selena (which I still want to write… but haven’t started). One of the ideas was a story about a noir-style private eye who gets sucked in by your typically seductive femme fatale. In my tale, instead of the typical “sexy dame uses tears to get our P.I. to investigate her husband’s death or cheating” motif, my femme fatale hires our crusty P.I. to go into a club called NightWhere on a rescue mission. To save her husband from a voyeur’s prison.
That story ultimately became “Field of Flesh” and I wrote it in 2013 with the intent to publish it as a short e-book tie-in to NightWhere. It was, in fact, the only story I’ve ever written with the intent to self-publish — I figured it would serve as a good promotional vehicle for the novel at the time. So I was just going to write it and put it out there myself, without a publisher. Ironically though… just about the time I finished writing the story, Dark Discoveries magazine approached me to see if I had any stories they might want to look at. I said… well… I just finished a piece, but it’s probably way too long for the magazine — almost 12,000 words (a typical short story is 1/2 or 1/3 of that word count). They said, “well… send it along, let’s look at it.”
I did, and they liked it. In fact, they liked it enough to look past the long length and buy it. So… I didn’t end up self-publishing the story after all. I also didn’t end up using it as a promotional tool the year that the novel itself was at its height of interest… because it took another 18 months before the story would finally appear in Dark Discoveries #30 at the start of 2015. It got good reviews, and at the end of 2015, it was re-published as part of my collection Sacrificing Virgins. One reader of that collection reviewed it on Amazon and noted: “This is a delightfully macabre collection of stories… One in particular, ‘Field of Flesh,’ haunted me long after I was done reading it. It was just so horrifying!”
After the story appeared in those venues, I figured I should wait a good amount of time before publishing a standalone version… so that delayed this e-book edition release further.
And now… here we are.
Four years after I wrote this story to publish as a short e-book, it is finally now available in that format!
NightWhere was republished at the start of this year with a new cover design, and fans of the original version will note that the cover art of Field of Flesh brings back the “bare midriff girl” from the original novel’s cover. (She also appears on the back cover of the current trade paperback edition of NightWhere… but e-book readers don’t see that.)
Check out both NightWhere tales on Amazon this week:
+~~~ NightWhere ~~~+~~~ Field of Flesh ~~~+
