Blood
Moon Fever
By Connal Bain
Genre: Horror, thriller, crime
About the Book
Crime
… Corruption … Werewolves. Just another day in LA.
David Goodwin isn’t having a good month. Sent on a manhunt after escaped felon ‘Hard Time Jake’ Griffon, he finds he has bitten off more than he can chew as he moves from the wooded Northern California wilderness to the mean streets of LA in pursuit of a man who has become something beyond human.
During Griffon’s bloody prison break, something happened in the woods of the Modoc Forest. Something inhuman. Something evil. Something terrifying.
Now, as the full moon prepares to rise over the City of Angels, Goodwin must piece together elements of a puzzle involving a fugitive on the run, a crooked lawyer, a violent drug cartel, and a string of bloody corpses left in the wake of an ancient terror now awake and hungry for fresh carnage.
Combining the hard-boiled realism of Jim Thompson with the gritty horror of Jack Ketchum and Clive Barker, Bain introduces a new brand of horror noir.
Savagely dark and wildly inventive, Blood Moon Fever introduces a powerful new voice to horror and crime fiction.
David Goodwin isn’t having a good month. Sent on a manhunt after escaped felon ‘Hard Time Jake’ Griffon, he finds he has bitten off more than he can chew as he moves from the wooded Northern California wilderness to the mean streets of LA in pursuit of a man who has become something beyond human.
During Griffon’s bloody prison break, something happened in the woods of the Modoc Forest. Something inhuman. Something evil. Something terrifying.
Now, as the full moon prepares to rise over the City of Angels, Goodwin must piece together elements of a puzzle involving a fugitive on the run, a crooked lawyer, a violent drug cartel, and a string of bloody corpses left in the wake of an ancient terror now awake and hungry for fresh carnage.
Combining the hard-boiled realism of Jim Thompson with the gritty horror of Jack Ketchum and Clive Barker, Bain introduces a new brand of horror noir.
Savagely dark and wildly inventive, Blood Moon Fever introduces a powerful new voice to horror and crime fiction.
About the Author
Connal
Bain is a freelance writer and novelist living a peripatetic life in the
Western United States. He has worked as a journalist, long-haul truck driver,
short-order cook, labor organizer, and bookstore clerk, among other odds and
ends. Traveling from job to job around the great American West has
provided him the opportunity to spend much of his free time writing, often
gathering story and character ideas from his experiences on the road.
An
avid reader from an early age, he became a horror and mystery enthusiast upon
discovering a treasure trove of paperback originals in his parents’ basement in
junior high school, beginning with John D. MacDonald and Manley Wade Wellman
and working up through King, Herbert, and the late great Jim Thompson.
His
fascination with all things dark and creepy grew as he expanded his tastes to
the classics and the pulps, always finding pleasure in the genre at
hand. This brought him a great respect for the printed word,
regardless of the merits of canonical “literary” value. Always in
search of a tale well-told, he began writing his own detective and supernatural
horror stories in high school, and has been writing ever since.
Links:
Excerpt:
Water ran down the
bathroom sink drain, stained red and then pink before finally running clear.
Griffon splashed water on his face, clearing away spots of blood and bits of
flesh and hair. He ran handfuls of water over his hair, slicking it back with
his fingers before looking into the mirror over the sink. He turned his head from
left to right, mesmerized by the return of normalcy to his features, then wiped
the sink clean with his hands before turning off the water.
He
grabbed a towel off the bar mounted to the wall and glanced at the slip of
paper resting on the toilet tank. A Home Depot invoice with a photocopy of a
returned check attached. He studied the name and address on the check copy
while he dried his hands.
“Well,
pleased to meet you, Mr. Hollister,” he chuckled, crumpling the papers and
burying them beneath a pile of used tissues in the trash next to the toilet.
He
froze, listening intently. Moving silently out of the bathroom, he slunk to the
living room and stood still, listening. A light breeze blew in through the open
windows, stirring the mesh curtains. He turned to the front door and
dropped into a crouch. For a moment, the only sound came from the
radio in the kitchen. Suddenly, the door crashed open, swinging from broken
hinges. Tear gas canisters crashed through the window screens, filling the room
with a haze of chemical smoke. Black-clad SWAT team members burst through the
door frame in respirators and full body armor. Beams of light
crisscrossed the room from flashlights clipped under the barrels of their assault
rifles.
Griffon
whirled as the back door shattered and more SWAT officers swarmed in. Smoke
rapidly filled the room.
“On
the ground! On the ground now! Hands behind your head. Do it now!”
Griffin
let his face go slack and complied. One officer stood over him, the
barrel of his M4 aimed at his head while another landed with one knee on his
back and cuffed his wrists behind his back.
“We
clear?” said the man aiming at Griffon.
“We’re
clear,” said a voice from the kitchen. “Sir, you’d better come back here.”
The
team leader stepped away from Griffon’s prone form, another officer immediately
stepping into his place. He crossed to the kitchen where a group of officers
were huddled, staring at something partially hidden by the door.
The
walls and counters were bathed in streaks of blood and gore, running in the
crazy patterns of a psychotic abstract painter. Behind the island
counter, a pair of nylon-clad legs protruded, ending in bloody knobs where they
had been torn off at the knees. White bone and cartilage glistened under the
florescent lights.
To
call the room an abattoir would be an insult to abattoirs. Bits of flesh and
muscle lay scattered across the floor and a slimy blood trail led around the
corner to the side.
“Where’s
the rest of her?”
“Something
over here,” said another officer in a shaky voice, pointing at the sink.
The
team leader walked to the sink, sidestepping the pools of blood on the
floor. He peered inside, ignoring the gagging sounds from the other
men in the room. In the sink lay an eyeball, a gangly network of nerves still
attached. The blue iris stared back at him, the whites shot through with a spiderwebbing
of thin red lines.
“What
the fuck did he do to her? Check the knives, power tools. Everything. Anything.
There’s still a lot of body missing.”
“Sir,”
said an officer standing at the edge of the blood trail at the opposite end of
the kitchen. He vomited into an empty evidence bag and stepped back. The team
leader edged the crime scene and peered around the corner.
“Aw,
Jesus…”
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