Here are the covers of my published books, available in paperback and for Kindle, as well as links to their locations on Amazon (just click on the cover).
Remember, 50% of all royalties will go to literacy charities such as RIF (Reading Is Fundamental).
Three men. Three dark journeys.
One man enters a room that should not exist and discovers a mysterious book containing secrets of dreadful power.
Another man discovers in himself an ability that will reveal mysteries of life…and death.
A third man enters a popular nightclub, where seemingly impossible events are commonplace, and where his life is changed…forever.
Welcome to realms of darkness, fear, and wonder. Welcome to Paradox City.
For paperback edition, click here.
“On a bright, clear, early autumn day…the world changed suddenly for David McCarthy.”
While on his way to the library to study, college student David abruptly finds himself in a featureless, cylindrical room. There he meets two men named Anderson and Greer who tell him that he is now more than two hundred years in the future.
Anderson and Greer reveal that they have brought David to their present for a reason: The world they live in is controlled by a powerful entity known to all as the Father…and they want David to help set them free from his reign.
As for why they have chosen David for this purpose…that is the most unbelievable, and the most terrible, revelation of all.
Demi-Vampire: Mark Reed is an ordinary teenage boy. When he sees a woman being attacked, he rushes to help her, only to be stabbed by her assailant. But the woman he sought to aid was a vampire, and as he lies, bleeding to death in an alley, he sees her deal easily with her attacker. Then, unwilling to let him die because of the heroism of his actions, she saves his life…the only way she can. The next day, Mark awakens to find that he has been changed in ways he could not have believed, potentially forever. Now he must hide his new nature from his family and friends, learning about his powers and the dangers they entail, and looking for a cure for his new condition. All the while he must guard against his nearly irresistible blood-lust, for if he should kill a human by draining their blood, he will become a full vampire. And a full vampire can never be cured, even by death.
Middle-school students Alex, Meghan, and Simon discover a cluster of delightfully fragrant, irresistibly delicious berries in the fruit bowl in Alex’s house. Assuming the berries to have been bought by Alex’s mother, they eat them all. But this fruit is like nothing ever grown on Earth.
That night, the friends share a dream about an impossible city-mountain floating at the edge of a horizon-spanning cliff with no other side, just an endless rusty sky. Over the next few days, they begin to see and hear strange people and bizarre creatures that no one else seems to notice. Eventually, they are abducted to the world of their dream, where the sky is always sunset, where feathered reptiles work alongside humans, where mole-weasel creatures dig caverns by manipulating space itself, and where the miraculous plants can think and communicate telepathically with gifted individuals called Gardeners. There they learn of an impending catastrophe of horrifying proportions: The collision of that world’s universe with ours, a cataclysm that would destroy everything in both realms!
They also learn that there are people—and an Other—that want the collision to happen, in order to fulfill a terrible prophecy. Now Alex, Meghan, and Simon must do what they can, with new abilities they have gained by eating the berries, to escape from those who serve that prophecy, and eventually to help save both universes…all while trying not to get in trouble for being late to school.
Peter Lunsford, a lonely, book-loving, self-educated and self-destructive salesman, has an abrupt and radical change of fortune. His subsequent actions lead a genius named Darrell White, enabled and inspired by Peter’s choices, to create the world’s first artificial intelligence. Unfortunately, this happens at a time when humanity has devastated itself with global war, and is unprepared to accept the existence of these new and superior minds. These facts will combine to create a future that Peter would not have had the courage to expect, and the implications of which are impossible to foresee.
Tommy—a former Marine, a part-time construction worker, dependent on opiates for the treatment of chronic pain—is waiting for the train home one evening, when he sees a strange, shivering, ill-appearing woman seated on a bench across the track from him. Her presence fills him with dread and revulsion, for no reason he can understand. Even after a month passes, she remains, seated in the same place, always visibly suffering. No one else at the station ever seems to see her at all. But Tommy sees her, and even dreams about her.
And she sees him.
While driving through central Pennsylvania on a road trip from New Jersey to Chicago, Jonathan Lama spies a peculiar pairing on top of an approaching hill: A huge pecan tree, next to which lurks an out-of-place scarecrow. Intrigued, and craving a break in his long drive, he pulls off the highway and goes into the nearby gas station.
There, he hears the story of a man named Joshua Caesar, a person of possibly supernatural evil, who terrorized the region almost seventy years before, and was finally brought to rough justice by his neighbors in retaliation for his crimes. Local legend holds that the figure of the scarecrow is Joshua Caesar’s body—not changing, not decaying, staked out next to the highway for nearly seventy years.
Jon is entertained but of course does not believe the tale. Then his car suddenly refuses to start, and while he waits for a tow-truck to arrive, stranger things begin to happen…things which lead him to doubt his sanity, and to wonder if, just maybe, the legends of Joshua Caesar’s unchanging scarecrow corpse are actually real.
It’s the early nineteen-nineties, and Jerry, a successful advertising executive, is having a breakdown. He’s done too much shading of the truth, and he’s watched too much Headline News, and he can no longer make sense of the world. Now, sitting at the breakfast table, he contemplates the possible future for himself and his family while dealing out a hand of solitaire…
While heading for his car after a night out celebrating the closing of a big deal at work, Paul Taylor meets a strange, despondent man, poorly dressed for the cold, who seems horribly depressed by some personal setback. Still slightly drunk on both alcohol and success, Paul invites the man for a cup of coffee and some food at a nearby all-night diner.
There, this peculiar man tells Paul of a conspiracy begun by the creators of various social and virtual media companies…and of technology that allowed these conspirators to control the minds of the people of the world for their own personal enrichment. He tells of the overthrow of that conspiracy by a group of which he had been part…a group which had then turned on and “exiled” him.
Though the man’s story is engaging, and the man himself is personally convincing, Paul is forced to admit that he has heard of no such conspiracy or overthrow.
The man finally explains to Paul why he hasn’t heard of it. It’s an answer that Paul cannot believe…
…until the man proves it.
Would you try to help a dog locked inside a car on a hot, sunny day?
Brian certainly would. As an environmentally conscious “near-vegan,” he loves all the creatures of the world—even humans, most of the time—and he does his best to help them whenever he can. So, when he hears the obvious sound of a dog trapped in a black SUV on the hottest day of the year, he commits himself to helping it get out if its owner doesn’t arrive within a few minutes.
But isn’t that an unusually dark SUV? Even the windows are so tinted that Brian can’t see inside.
And don’t those barks and whimpers sound just a little…off? What breed of dog makes sounds like that?
These are troubling questions, and as Brian will learn, sometimes even the noblest of intentions can lead one to places one might do better to avoid.
Charley Banks is an ordinary English major at a prestigious middle-American university, with friends, a part-time job, a long-term girlfriend, and loving parents. For fun and for an interesting experience – and to get a bit of extra money – he takes part in a seemingly unremarkable and benign experiment in the Neuroscience Department, testing a new version of a trans-cranial magnetic stimulator. After the initial test, however, Charley has a severe seizure in the MRI machine.
He awakens in the hospital to discover that now, with just a touch, he can extend his mind into others, replacing their consciousness with his own, operating their bodies, having access to their personalities and memories. Initially this control lasts only while he is touching them, but soon the power grows, and Charley finds himself able to control others even when they are no longer in contact. He also learns that he can control more than one person at a time, and that each new person he incorporates can extend him further into others.
Thrilled by his new ability, Charley determines to keep it a secret, at first even from his girlfriend, while he explores its implications and its limits, if there are any. Though he thoughtlessly reveals something of the power to the professor who ran the initial experiment, the professor does not believe him.
It soon becomes clear, however – or it would if anyone knew of it – that something else has changed in Charley, beyond his paranormal power. For in his use of his new ability, he quickly begins to do increasingly terrible things…especially once he learns what happens when someone dies while he is controlling them.
Though forcefully severed by the MRI machine from the minds he had inhabited, Charley’s power is undiminished. Incited by the abrupt separation, he immediately sets about reextending himself much more than before. In short order, he encompasses every patient and employee at Denton Regional Hospital, as well as their families.
Though happily and easily spreading his mind without any apparent limit – and discovering that he can join with animals, even insects, as easily as humans – Charley decides that he must try to understand more about his power after the vulnerability demonstrated by the MRI.
He decides to enlist his neurologist, Dr. Weintraub, to take the lead in exploring how his power works. At Ellen’s request, Charley promises never to take over Dr. Weintraub – nor Michael, who is also “recruited” to help him. In light of this promise, to ensure cooperation from these people who are to remain separate from him, Charley possesses the neurologist’s wife and children and threatens them with death and worse at their own or each other’s hands if the neurologist or Michael should act against him.
While Dr. Weintraub bristles under the threat to his family, he, Michael, and Ellen must try to find a way to cure or stop Charley, fearful of discovery by a deranged mind who could inhabit any person or animal they encounter. If they cannot cure Charley – who continues to do terrible things to those he controls, considering them disposable parts of his own being – could they stop him by killing him? Or would the loss of his original body be no more inconvenient than the loss of so many others he kills for the ecstasy such death gives him?
Is there any hope of stopping whatever Charley has become, or will he encompass the entire world without anyone other than these three even knowing of the danger?
A young teacher named Martin Wallace picks up a strange hitchhiker in an overcoat and an old-fashioned hat on his way to his new job in the university town of Eddington.
A college student named Janice Lundgren starts to have vivid and terrifying nightmares featuring a figure in a hat and overcoat, his face always obscured.
A prostitute named Ami Forrester is horrifically murdered by a man in a gray overcoat and gray felt hat. The following night, her body disappears and the doctor who was to perform her autopsy is found dead. They are not the last to die unnaturally.
In the same week, Jake Schneider, another college student, is surprised by a visit from his cousin, Scott. Though Scott initially claims to have come for a self-reflective break from his own studies, it soon becomes clear that he knows or suspects something about the murders in Eddington.
When pressured by Jake, who himself has experienced uncanny visions and disturbing encounters, Scott reveals that he is not merely visiting to take a break from college. He is pursuing the man who brutally murdered his parents…a man who wore a gray overcoat and a gray, felt fedora.
But this killer is not merely a man. He has already survived Scott stabbing him through the heart. No one who sees him can ever remember his face. And what he does to his victims is worse than murder.
Jake, Scott, and Janice, with the help of Janice’s mother, a self-proclaimed psychic, learn that this entity has come to Eddington to perform a ritual that will lead to untold, eternal horror for the entire world. And Jake, it seems, is the only one who might be able to stop it.
But how can three college students and a Greenwich Village psychic possibly stand against an entity that has wandered the world for tens of thousands of years, that can warp the human mind, that can never be recognized for what it really is unless it allows itself to be seen…an entity whose power is growing as its goal comes closer…an entity that can consume the very souls of those who might stand in its way?
[Click here for the hardcover link]
Open the Cabinet doors.
Behind them lies a peculiar collection of events, items, and people from the amazing to the horrible…
A door knocking at three in the morning, though there’s no one on the porch.
A man who suddenly appears one night, banished to a city in the heart of America from a place to which it’s impossible for anyone ever to return.
A destitute woman withdrawing from drugs, seated on a bench in a train station, but only one man can see her.
A pet locked in a black SUV on the hottest day of the year, and a well-meaning passerby who may learn anew where the road paved by his good intentions leads.
A game of solitaire dealt by a man suffering from crippling depression as he ponders his future and that of his family.
An act of generosity by a lonely salesman that may change the nature of earthly intelligence forever.
A scarecrow crucified under a tree in Pennsylvania, the unchanging memorial of a man of reputedly supernatural evil…or perhaps the body of the man himself.
And lurking in the shadowed heart of a bizarre, unfinished house, a creature or force that neatly slices the fingers off a nine-year-old boy’s right hand leaving crystals of ice on the wounds—a creature or force that may be only the least terrifying thing within this horrible dwelling-to-be.
Come. Open the doors. Look inside.
The Cabinet seems small, but it is deceptively deep. And in places it is…
Dark. Too dark to see clearly.
But surely, you can safely open it, look inside, and simply close the doors again. Surely, such a Cabinet is too narrow for you to stumble into and become lost, never to find your way out again.
Robert Elessar 