Halloween’s here and with it the end of our journey together. It’s been fun sharing my gruesome finds with all of you and I hope you’ve found at least one new book or author to enjoy as the nights grow longer and the dark grows deeper. I have one more find to share with you today, plus a few comments to make about two of my own tales, before we close the book on our little adventure together.
Most of us have something we fear. Something that sets off that primal warning system deep in our psyche, that starts shouting as us to run even before we’ve managed to get a grip on the situation. Hospitals do that to me. Just setting foot inside one sends my pulse racing and my head darting from side to side as I subconsciously searching for a way back out. Fear might be too strong a word, but there’s no doubt that I’m experiencing some severe mental discomfort.
Which is why the Edie Spence novels by Cassie Alexander made my list of “horrifying” reads. The main character’s a trauma nurse in the secret wing of a hospital that handles paranormal patients, from vampire servants to moon-crazed werewolves to the zombie next door. Horrifying is right! They’re dark, gruesome, and rather fun in their own way…
NIGHTSHIFTED
Cassie Alexander
Edie’s just trying to learn the ropes so she can get through her latest shift unscathed. But when a vampire servant turns to dust under her watch, all hell breaks loose. Now she’s haunted by the man’s dying words—Save Anna—and before she knows it, she’s on a mission to rescue some poor girl from the undead. Which involves crashing a vampire den, falling for a zombie, and fighting for her soul. Grey’s Anatomy was never like this…
Book two in the series, MOONSHIFTED, is due out next month.
Throughout this series several of you have written in asking what I would recommend as Halloween reads from my own modest body of work. If you’re inclined to seek it out, I’d suggest the following:
THE HERETIC
Joseph Nassise
Boston SWAT officer Cade Williams doesn’t believe in the supernatural until a chance meeting with a fallen angel leaves his wife dead and him holding on to life by the thinnest of margins. When he is discharged from the hospital, scarred body and soul, he discovers the encounter has left him with a few otherworldly talents of his own.
Several years later, Knight Commander Cade Williams runs the elite Templar combat unit known as the Echo Team, which puts him in the perfect position to search for the creature he’s come to know as the Adversary. His efforts yield little success, however, until a cabal of necromancers attempts to seize an ancient Templar artifact for their own nefarious purposes and gives him the first real lead he’s had in ages. Now it’s time for Cade to face his demons – human and otherwise.
THE HERETIC is book one in the internationally bestselling Templar Chronicles series that also includes A SCREAM OF ANGELS and A TEAR IN THE SKY.
If modern day Templars battling the supernatural doesn’t do it for you, perhaps you’d have more fun with an old-fashioned zombie apocalypse – particularly one set in the midst of a steampunked World War I.
BY THE BLOOD OF HEROES
Joseph Nassise
At the tail end of 1917, the Germans introduced a new type of gas to the battlefield, T-Leiche, or “corpse gas,” and changed the face of the war by resurrecting the bodies of the dead, giving the enemy an almost unlimited source of fresh troops.
When the American ace Major Jack Freeman-poster boy for the war against the Kaiser’s undead army of shamblers-is downed over enemy lines and taken captive, veteran Captain Michael “Madman” Burke is the only man brave and foolish enough to accept the mission to recover Freeman. Burke assembles a team of disparate members, from his right-hand man, Sergeant Moore, to big-game-hunter-turned-soldier Clayton Manning, who funds the mission for an opportunity to confront this most dangerous zombie game, to professor Dan Richards, one of Tesla’s top men and the resident authority on all things supernatural. With the help of a highly advanced British dirigible war machine to infiltrate enemy territory, the team faces incredible danger as it struggles to reach the prison camp and strike at the heart of the enemy.
But they are pitted against the most deadly enemy of all: Manfred von Richthofen, the Red Baron. Having risen from the dead with his abilities enhanced but his mind on the brink of madness, Richthofen has plans for victory that give no quarter to soldiers or civilians.
Thanks for joining me and Kobo on this moonlight tour of the dark corners of the literary landscape. I hope you’ve enjoyed the trip and wish you all a very happy Halloween!
All the best,
Joe Nassise
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Joseph Nassise is the author of more than twenty novels, including the internationally bestselling Templar Chronicles series, the Great Undead War series, and the Jeremiah Hunt trilogy. He is a former president of the Horror Writers Association, the world’s largest organization of professional horror writers, and a multiple Bram Stoker Award and International Horror Guild Award nominee.
You can find him online at Shades of Reality.
