Welcome to the New Year's Blog Hop!

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Well, it's 2013 so the world didn't end as predicted once more. I trust none of you reading this went too overboard in expectation of yet another predicted apocalypse and lived your lives to their fullest despite all the hype. The world moves on and what better way to start the New Year than by blog hopping, meeting new authors, and perhaps finding a new book to read?

As part of my post, I am featuring a story from a frequent contributor to this blog, Dorothy Davies, "Happy New Year." To read this story click this link: http://georgewilhite.blogspot.com/2012/12/happy-new-year-by-dorothy-davies.html

NOW--THE PRIZE INFORMATION FOR THIS EVENT!

CARRIE ANN  BLOG HOPS IS GIVING AWAY THREE GRAND PRIZES. You, as a reader, can go to EACH blog and comment with your email address and be entered to win. Yep, you can enter over 200 times!

1st Grand Prize: A Kindle Fire or Nook Tablet

2nd Grand Prize: A $300 Amazon or B&N Gift Card

3rd Grand Prize: A Swag Pack that contains paperbacks, ebooks, 50+ bookmarks, cover flats, magnets, pens, coffee cozies, and more!

AND HERE ARE MY BLOG'S GIVEAWAYS FOR THIS EVENT:

Signed copy of my self published debut collection of horror stories On the Verge of Madness. For more details and reviews of this book, click this link: On the Verge of Madness.

$5.00 gift certificate good towards e-books at Musa Publishing. Check out my new collection from Musa, Silhouette of Darkness or Musa's Main Page to explore the e-books available. 

COFFEE!! -- Your choice of either Starbuck's $5.00 gift card for (2) Specialty beverages (ecups) from Peet's.







HOW TO ENTER:

Simple! Leave a comment on this blog post. Say something about New Year's Eve, New Year's Day, your resolutions for 2013, the 12/21/12 hype--anything along those lines.

You must provide your email address in the comment to qualify. I don't want to pick a winner and then have to find them. It's not fair to the other participants.

The gift certificates can be sent via email.

If you are the winner of the signed copy of On the Verge of Madness, I will pay to ship it to you but you will need to provide a shipping address.

You can enter once per day, so that gives you up to six chances--you just need to make a unique comment each time--no cutting and pasting! PLEASE NOTE--YOU WILL ONLY BE ENTERED ONCE PER BLOG FOR CARRIE ANN'S GRAND PRIZES.

I will post the winners at this blog on January 7, 2013.

This contest is fully administered and funded by this blog and is in no way affiliated with the giveaways of the main blog page or of any of the other participants.

Enjoy the hop and good luck with your prize entries. Before returning you to the hop, and the over 200 great blogs involved, I will leave you with a quick poem by David S. Pointer, another frequent contributor to this blog.

Please follow my blog for more information about myself, other contributors and special guests that pop in from time to time. Mike Flanagan, director of Absentia, and Jeffrey Thomas, author of the Punktown novels are just two guests to be interviewed here in 2013.

David has recent work in Star*Line and elsewhere. He is the author of Sundrenched Nanosilver (soon to be reviewed and featured here), Sinister Splashplay, and others.

Post Party Clean Up
David S. Pointer

Every white January 1st,
womens’ bodies strewn
on our front lawn like
yard art decorations,
encased in protective
metal, we kiss to great
days ahead then release
champagne bottle shaped
balloons before alerting
locality bound space cops

WELCOME TO ZOMBIE BLOG HOP

 

WELCOME TO THE BLOG HOP OF ALL THINGS ZOMBIE!

THIS IS A ONE DAY ONLY BLOG HOP

My horror stories vary in theme, subject matter and types of monsters, but I have been known to spin a zombie tale once in a while.

To read my flash fiction story, "The Leftovers"--CLICK HERE.

To promote this blog hop, I am giving away a copy of my new ebook horror collection Silhouette of Darkness. Full details on how to enter are provided below.



Silhouette of Darkness Page, Buy Links

Silhouette of Darkness includes the zombie story "Now Playing."

It's 1980.

The last thing Gabe remembers is being quite tanked at a Halloween party. He wakes up in a coffin at a funeral home, assuming he is the victim of a sick practical joke.

As he leaves the building, he begins noticing some freaky things about himself and also soon learns it is now Election Night. What happened to those four nights in between?

The answers are shocking....





Those of you who follow this blog know David S. Pointer, a speculative genre poet who can always be relied on to contribute a piece on ay subject. Here is his contribution to the zombie hop, which also has a bit of holiday flavor added for good measure.

The No Zombie Poetry Zone

David S. Pointer

Zombie war protester,
ringing his bell alongside
a medical punk princess
working holidays with the
Salvation Army Corps
of Christmas volunteers,
about to read his zombie
redneck Christmas poem,
but the princess asks him
not to in the name of mad
medical science everywhere
and the old trench shotgun
in the trunk of her red car.

AND NOW---THE RULES OF THE CONTEST:

Anyone can enter the contest by doing two things:

1) Post a comment on the blog. You can leave me feedback on the blog itself, comment on your experience with the blog hop, or say something about our mutual friends--zombies!

2) Follow this blog by ENTERING YOUR EMAIL in the "FOLLOW BY EMAIL" BOX on the sidebar of the blog. If you are already a follower and/or a friend on Facebook, mention that in your blog comment.

The contest begins at Midnight, December 6, 2012 and ends at Midnight December 7, 2012. ONE DAY ONLY!

Please be sure to provide your email address in your comment so I can contact you.

Silhouette of Darkness is available in any ebook format or as a PDF.

 The winner will be announced on this blog and my facebook page no later than December 9, 2012.

This contest is fully funded and operated by me and not Precious Monsters or the Zombie Blog Hop.

Thanks for participating and good luck!

Also, a shout out to our gracious host, Precious Monsters!

CLICK ON ANY LINK BELOW TO CONTINUE HOPPING:

Do You Believe in Ghosts? Stories in my new book SILHOUETTE OF DARKNESS Explore this Universal Theme

It is wonderful that five thousand years have now elapsed since the creation of the world, and still it is undecided whether or not there has ever been an instance of the spirit of any person appearing after death. All argument is against it; but all belief is for it.

-SAMUEL JOHNSON, The Life of Samuel Johnson

This quote is as true today as ever. Even though the show Ghost Hunters and its countless imitators has offered a certain level of proof spirits exist, most often that evidence is still not nearly enough to win over stanch skeptics.

Over two hundred more years have passed since Johnson wrote this—two hundred years of vast technological advancement—and still, this subject comes down to the simple notion of belief vs. disbelief.

Fiction provides an effective venue where this debate can be mediated in a safe environment. While readers entertain the notion that ghost smay exist, we are safe in this created world we can leave at any time, compared to a more extreme form of experiment, such as agreeing to attend a séance or serious session with a Ouija board.

In his book The Fantastic (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1975), Tsvetan Todorov offers one of the best explanations of how readers participate in a “gothic hesitation” to sort out this potentially disturbing subject.

The fantastic, we have seen, lasts only as long as a certain hesitation: a hesitation common to reader and character, who must decide whether or not what they perceive derives from reality as it exists in the common opinion. At the story's end, the reader makes a decision even if the character does not; he opts for one solution or the other, and thereby emerges from the fantastic. If he decides that the laws of reality remain intact and permit an explanation of the phenomena described, we say that the work belongs to another genre: the uncanny. If, on the contrary, he decides that new laws of nature must be entertained to account for the phenomena, we enter the genre of the marvelous.

I have had my own brushes with the uncanny and found there is always a frustration when trying to relay the experience to a friend later on. In the moment, I was positive I was faced with the “new laws of nature” Todorov presents, and that “all belief was for it,” but once I began explaining it to another person, the certainty became diminished with each passing word I tried to place upon it.

This is why ghost stories are so popular. We read the book, or watch the film, and can safely entertain the notion, in the guise of fiction, that we accept the supernatural as real. We are safe there. We wander the halls of The Overlook or Hill House expecting entertainment but also to enter the world of the what if, the Todorovian hesitation that allows for the real possibility that the spirit world is real.

My new collection, Silhouette of Darkness includes two ghost stories.

The Blues in A Minor

Since surviving a tragic accident, Mona is troubled by blackouts. Waking from one of these spells, she enters an eerie tenement and discovers Zach, a young man who plays blues guitar that speaks to her soul.

An Act of Naming
Norman wanders the streets after a night of drinking and meets Angela, a homeless amnesiac. The moment their eyes meet is the beginning of an evening of mystery.

These stories are not meant to frighten or disturb, as are most of the other selections in Silhouette of Darkness. Rather, they explore the classic themes at the heart of every ghost story—who are the ghosts and more importantly why are they spirits? What has trapped them in the region between life and whatever exists beyond death?

To read these ghost stories, and eleven other tales of horror and dark fantasy, check out Silhouette of Darkness, available in all electronic formats through Musa Publishing  here:

http://musapublishing.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=397

MONSTERS ABOUND IN MY NEW HORROR COLLECTION SILHOUETTE OF DARKNESS

My childhood was immersed in reruns of old monster movies and other creepy stuff from the Fifties and Sixties. I remember staying up late on Saturday nights (if I could stay awake) with my Dad, watching Bob Wilkins hosting “Creature Features” in the San Francisco Bay Area. Those great old films knew how to scare us without relying on gore and exploitation.


I write all kinds of horror but particularly like to create work that harkens back to those early days of monster cinema without overtly stealing their tropes. Readers of my fiction know I write very few vampires, werewolves, and other traditional monsters. While these creatures make an occasional appearance, I tend to create my own original monsters, or at least my own hybrids or mutations of what has come before.

Buy from Publisher in all e-book formats

In Silhouette of Darkness, my new e-book release from Musa Publishing, you will find these “Creature Features”:

Fatal Insomnia

The central idea of this story began with the characters, not the monster. I wanted to write a story in one setting, with a few characters who were isolated together for some time, and going slowly mad. I would pick up their story far down the road, on the night that everything went to Hell.

I wrote about three siblings and their best friend living in a farmhouse, and after sketching them a bit I decided that, for some still unknown reason, they were forced to stay awake all night and sleep during the day. Their normal circadian rhythms disrupted, this was the pressure that drove them to the breaking point.

The monster of this story, The Blight, took shape from this central idea. I wanted the creature to be a bizarre construction of unknown origin. The knowledge that one must stay awake all night to avoid being its victim came from experience with it, not because anyone understood exactly what was going on.

I hope you agree The Blight is worthy of comparison to some of the stranger monster movies of old, and perhaps even a nod to one of my favorite masters of the horror, H. P. Lovecraft.

Jerrod’s Brood

I remember being very creeped out by the film “Willard.” Watching it now, it seems a bit corny, but the whole notion of a loser like Willard communing with rats and becoming their master is still disturbing. I wanted to take another loser and “bless” him (or curse him, depending on your viewpoint) with a brood of his own, creatures that seem to appear from nowhere but bond to him immediately.

Read this story to find out where life takes this poor soul on this fateful night.

Ashton Howard’ Dark Process

Carnivals are fun but they can also be a bit scary, right? Whether it’s the Bradbury classic “Something Wicked this Way Comes,” the clown in “It,” or some of the characters in the B-movies exploiting the carnie life, at one time or another we have all mused about the possibility that all may not be as merry with carnivals and circuses as they appear on the surface.

I wanted to take the idea of the freak show and give it a bit of a horror twist. What if there are no actual “freaks of nature,” but instead an evil mad scientist is creating them?

Read this short story and learn secret behind the sideshow “Ashton Howard’s Tent of Oddities.”

These are just three of the creatures I created in the dark tales found in Silhouette of Darkness.

STILL CAN’T GET ENOUGH MONSTERS?

CHECK OUT MY FLASH FICTION ANTHOLOGY, MONSTER GALLERY

Buy from Amazon

As editor of this collection, I simply put out a call for flash fiction featuring monsters. No more specific conditions on content. I received hundreds of tales of wondrous and horrible creatures, some humorous, others poignant, many quite disturbing.

The end result is 93 flash fiction stories of every type of monster imaginable by these great writers.

Jeffrey Thomas, author of the Punktown series and many other stories and novels, provided a wonderful introduction on the subject at hand.

Check it out at the Amazon purchase link below the cover image.

So if you like monsters, you need look no further Silhouette of Darkness and Monster Gallery. What are you waiting for?

As always, if you check out either or both of these books, I would be most greateful if you left your thoughts in comments on Goodreads, Amazon, or any other review forum.

Follow my blog by entering your email on the sidebar or through Google Friends Connect to learn more about my own writing as well as that of my guests.