During July and August, I am co-hosting Angela B. Chrysler’s Brain to Books Blog Tour, where I will share information about 60+ authors and their works.
Fast Facts
Author: Adam McVeigh
Genre: Psychological and paranormal thriller/horror
Books: Zephaniah: A Horror Novella (Volume 1) of the Zephaniah series
Bio
Adam McVeigh lives in South Lincolnshire, England. His first book, Keep Off The Grass, a narrative non fiction account of his time as a community and political campaigner, was released as an independently published paperback in January 2015. His fictional works are primarily psychological and paranormal thrillers that are inspired by real life events and scenarios, including recent titles: Polly, and The Hanging Bridge. Both are short, quick read stories that form a ten volume collection due for publication in 2016.
Blurb
We know they are there. We have seen them. We have heard them. We have felt their presence. But science is the comfort blanket that protects us from the truth that we cannot bare to believe. When it is pulled away…we have no choice but to face them.
The lines between scientific explanation and paranormal terror are torn wide open in this dark psychological British horror.
Christmas nineteen ninety-five, a physics teacher takes his family on holiday to the snow-covered village of Gwennal, in Cornwall. When his five-year-old daughter tells him that she has seen Santa Claus, unwelcome and chilling events begin to plague the family’s stay at their seventeenth-century cottage. His choice of accommodation is further brought into question when his wife suffers a series of mind-bending paranormal horrors. Firmly believing scientific explanation－just like his fourteen-year-old son who plans to follow in the career footsteps carved-out before him－he suspects that she has relapsed to her abuse of prescription painkillers. Until, that is, the comfort blanket of science becomes an instrument of torture when staff at a local museum reveal more than he can bare to discover.
What happens to a family when drug abuse and malevolent spirits are combined? Step on board for the hell-ride of your life and experience the Bradshaw family’s Cornish nightmare.
Excerpt
From behind Sarah, the worn-leather boots of Zephaniah had crushed the frost and ice beneath them as he marched past, just inches from her paralysed body.
He stopped beside the slaughtered flesh.
With only moonlight to guide her eyes through the shadows that swamped the world around her, Sarah recognised his long, thick woollen cloak and his unkempt beard that fell to his chest as though he were vomiting worms; she recognised his movements, his steps and the dread that seeped from his very presence.
He snatched at the feet of the corpse. A gloved fist locked around each ankle as though trying to choke the last desperate screams of life from them. He then raised the legs and dragged with the ease of a man wheeling a barrow.
The blooded torso thudded and slapped on the sculptured stone of Chapel Cottage’s front step, before being swallowed inside the darkness of the doorway.
Sarah looked on. She could do nothing else. The illuminated cottage in front of her began to fade under a pitch-black darkness. It was washing over the street, indiscriminately covering everything under the crashing black wave as the moon’s light died.
She stood in complete darkness. There was no breeze to pull her hair. Her feet were no longer stuck to cobbles laced with ice, they were resting on the hard wooden surface of floorboards, cushioned by a layer of dust and grime.