My latest release in the Horror Story series is out and available at Amazon. At 75 pages it’s not exactly “short” as I keep saying these stories should be, so you’re getting a bargain. Here’s the blurb behind the book.
Bedtime Story
It was just an old bed — rather ordinary, bought for the spare room. Except that a hundred years earlier a woman called Rose, who practiced in the occult and dark magic, slept in it. Now Rose’s unhappy spirit comes as part of the deal – Rose’s angry ghost comes with the bed. That’s not what you’d call a bargain.
Angela and Nathan are a young couple, married only two years before, both of them professionals. They’re happy and in love, although the pressures of modern life can be challenging some days. The antique bed is just right for the spare room in their expensive apartment.
Rose’s spirit doesn’t like happy marriages unless you’re prepared to wed the Devil.
Sleeping in the bed promises erotic dreams with perfect lovers — more passionate and daring than your wife, more considerate and satisfying than your husband. Before long, the dreams are much better than reality.
Three’s a crowd in any relationship even when one person is already dead.
***
Readers please note: This story contains some strong sex scenes that aren’t common in my previous Horror Story releases.
This is the now-famous Cooper Family ghost photograph. I’m fascinated by pictures like these. Years ago I borrowed a book from the library called (something like) “350 Famous Ghost Photographs” and it contained – no surprises – 350 pictures of ghosts, fairies (Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle was a big believe in fairies or “faeries”) ectoplasms and lots of other paranormal stuff. This picture wasn’t one of them, but the concept behind the book was interesting. Every photograph included was, to the photographer’s knowledge, genuine. In other words, they may well have been the victim of some kind of hoax, but the person who took the picture believed it to be real. With that in mind, it only needs just one of those pictures to be genuine and ghosts exist – and at odds of 350 to 1 what’s the chances…? Actually, you can apply the same thinking to UFO sightings. Really, is every single UFO sighting over the past, let’s say even just a hundred years, completely false? Every… single… one? (Hmm… worth another post I think)
Anyway, one of the pictures in that book prompted my short story called “The Girl In The Back Seat” a totally creepy photograph of a family that got lost driving to friend’s house. They used a pay-phone to call and ask directions, so their hosts were waiting in the driveway to take a photo of their arrival. When the picture was developed, a ghostly girl was sitting in the back seat. It’s the kind of innocent, utterly out-of-the-blue ghost photo that has infinitely more credibility than any team of ghost hunters running around haunted castles.
So what do you think of this one? The background story is distorted and retold by countless websites – many debunking the picture, some suggesting it’s real. Basically, it was a straightforward family photo that proved very, very different when it was developed. Is it a hoax by someone? Well, you’d have to say it’s an imaginative one. Hardly your standard “unexpected ghost in the background” picture.
I think it could be real and no amount of 21st century internet analysis about “wrong” shadows or angles and can lessen the impact of its original form. What possibly caused the hanging man is another debate altogether. Bottom line for me is that they are simply too many of these incidental ghost photographs for each and every one of them to be a hoax. They can’t all be fake – one of them must be real. Just one, remember? Maybe it’s this one?
One of the good things about being a long-established author these days is that several manuscripts that in the past never saw the book store bookshelves can be self-published instead. We’ve all got ’em. Plenty of manuscripts – not just mine – are rejected by publishers, because they don’t fit a certain criteria or their “list”. It’s not about whether the book is good enough or not.
I always had a lot of faith in The Mirror Of Madness and it bugged me no one saw its potential. So I’m really glad of the opportunity to publish it for myself. Of course, it needed a good editing spit-and-polish, then I had to design the cover. This is the end result. I’m calling it a paranormal fantasy, but it’s also all about modern witchcraft.
Here’s the Amazon US link http://www.amazon.com/Mirror-Madness-Story-Modern-Witchcraft-ebook/dp/B00QVFWNM6/ref=asap_B0058SQWQ0?ie=UTF8
I appreciate that a lot of mystery and thriller readers don’t like novellas – they’re simply not long enough. So in the interests of addressing that I’ve bundled my first three Lukas Boston books into a collection called “Murder, Mystery, Villains and Ghosts” and published it at a bargain price. The cover here was designed by Jennifer at Acappella Book Designs – great job, Jennifer! I’ve also started promoting the individual books through Amazon’s KDP Select, which unfortunately means they’ve been withdrawn for sale from other outlets. Get in tuch, if that’s a problem for you and maybe we can work something out?
Happy reading, and I hope you enjoy “Murder, Mystery, Villains and Ghosts”. You can find Amazon links here.
Here’s the new Momentum cover for Voices of Evil. The general storyline is about a man who is haunted by ghosts of Gallipoli soldiers, so you can see how Momentum have layered in images from the trenches and the sniper’s crosshairs on the skull. Awesome!