The Afterlife of Darkmares

Hip hip hooray! My new novel  "The Afterlife of Darkmares" is now out!

Today I'm going to ski-p my A-Z posts in favour of telling you about my latest publication. So I am officially anouncing my new thriller here...

The novel is available on http://www.lulu.com/ at present ( at a reduced price) but will soon be out on amazon too ( full price).

For anyone who is interested here is the back cover blurb:

When single mum Kate Linden’s disabled daughter dies unexpectedly she is stunned to find she is under suspicion of harming her. But Kate still has a 12year old son, Grif, who refuses to speak and is grappling with issues of his own – not least of which is his attachment to a supposedly imaginary friend. Kate’s relationship with her son is fraught as she struggles to make some kind of connection with him and also deal with her own intense grief.

Unbeknown to Kate, in 1665, a disastrous event - the plague - in a small Derbyshire village - has consequences that stretch into the 21^st Century and Kate is blind to the fact that her son (feeling estranged from all around him) has unwittingly allowed an evil entity to awaken and threaten them all.

 Kate must now fight her own demons and accept help from unlikely sources if she is to save her son from a fate worse than death. The help finally comes from a sleep therapist, an elderly bereaved lady and Jeremiah, an old man who hovers between life and death on a life support machine…

So, does the cover say 'spooky' to you or not?

All opinions very welcome...

Such Powerful Connotations...

B - BLACK IS BLACK...

What a simple but emotive word ‘black’ is…

Because of my favoured writing genre I associate it with the supernatural, the ‘Dark Arts’ and all things evil. But of course, first and foremost, it is simply the word we use to describe an absence of colour.

Oh, how the English language loves a simple word that can be twisted this way and that. I looked in the dictionary expecting to find the straightforward definition but no…. There are many more definitions - more than I could cope with. From being banned or boycotted to villainous, funereal and sable.

And then there are the add ons… Blackmail, blacklist, blackout, black death, black widow, black market, blackboard, blackleg etc. The list is endless but one thing that stood out for me is that many of these terms and words have such negative associations.  No wonder that the black community has for centuries hated the word. Although nowadays, the word is embraced and proudly used by those whose ancestry is African or African American, one can only wonder at the origin of the word. An absence of light and colour and the night sky must have been pretty scary to ancient peoples.

I defy anyone who writes supernatural thrillers to not use the word somewhere in their Manuscript. It is a word that conjures up all that one would wish when used in association with this type of writing. In any one picture or description, if it is meant to be scary or eerie, the colour black is always used. In my book "The Witcheye Gene" the antagonist has an aura which is totally black and I don't think I had to spell it out to the reader that this signified he was evil. Especially when others' auras were a variety of colours.

Such an interesting word with such powerful connotations...

For the rest, I leave you to ponder…

Do you use the word black often (apart from describing a colour) and in what circumstances?