Here’s hoping everyone had a great Holiday Season and you’re ready to do great things in 2013. I have a whole list of hopes and dreams and plans and schemes but time will tell how far along the list I make it. To kick off the year, I’ll be re-releasing one of my favorite novels, STRANGE MACIC.

Strange Magic is a book that I started over 20 years ago, back when I was in college, but only the first chapter of that old book ever survived. I had been trying to write a dark fantasy book about an evil magician/wizard dude and in the end it was terrible. I loved the first chapter though, so I kept the typewritten pages of that chapter in my drawer until about 2005 or so when I took them out and reread it, this time with an eye toward turning my original idea into a horror novel. Since I was a kid I’d always loved magic and the thrill of watching an escape artist defy death is still something that makes me smile even today. I’ve been to see David Copperfield and Chris Angel do their live shows and was simply blown away by how they could do the things they do right in front of you without you having a clue how they pulled it off. Amazing stuff!

Anyway, I’ve always wanted to write a novel about a magician and seeing as I had that first chapter still laying around about a bad one, it made sense to me to have two magicians. Horror to me is about good and evil, and the struggle between them so it was easy to make the leap of having one good magician and one evil one. That’s a simplified version of how things came about, of course, but that’s where it started. From there I let my muse run wild because although I wanted the book to be about magic and illusion, I didn’t want it to get bogged down in technical things and filled with too many tricks. At it’s heart, I still wanted the book to be about the magician, the person, rather than his magic. For anyone who has read my other books and stories, redemption has always been a key theme in my work, and Wilson Kemp, the alcoholic main character in Strange Magic, is badly in need of some major league redeeming. He’s living a lie in a small town, hiding from something terrible that happened in his past. He’s an alcoholic that has lost his wife and daughter but there is a reason that he lives at the bottom of a vodka bottle. His climb out of the bottle and his fight to win back his wife and daughter are what mattered to me. That’s the message and the strength of the book, in my humble opinion. I’m hoping people will cheer for him. I know I certainly was as I was writing it.

I don’t want to give anything else away about the story, but I will admit that the finished novel is a billion times better than the original fantasy/evil wizard book I started with. I honestly think this book has some of my very best plotting in it. I simply LOVE the way things all come together in the second half of this book. It’s a scary story that I’m really proud of. I hope you enjoy it too.

The novel starts out deep in the dark spooky woods, moves to the heart of small town American, but then heads for someplace much, much darker. Here is a teaser description of the novel for you:

A MAN HIDING FROM A TERRIBLE PAST…

Wilson Kemp is a man living a lie in Billington, Pennsylvania. He’s been in hiding for a long time, running from a dreadful secret that has forced him to change his name, move to this small secluded town and abandon what had once been a stellar career. Once, he’d been a talented escape artist on the brink of fame and fortune, but now he’s a broken down alcoholic scared of his own shadow. Mind you, he has good reason to be scared because his worst fear has finally caught up with him, and the sleepy little town of Billington is about to be declared a war zone.

HIS DARK SECRET ABOUT TO BE REVEALED…

With the aid of a malevolent entity trapped within an old wooden trunk, a stranger from Wilson’s past has hunted him down; an insane fellow magician who will stop at nothing to get his twisted, bloody revenge. To survive, Wilson will have to conquer his own inner demons to fight his old enemy in a battle that will lead to the gates of death and beyond. To live, Wilson will have to accomplish the greatest magic trick of all time: escaping from the dark pit of Hell itself…

Here is the awesome cover Adam Geen has created for the book. We went through half a dozen other potential covers, but in the end I wanted this one. Love how it gives me the creepy, strange feel of the book but also carries on the realistic, haunting feel of my other releases with EnemyOne. What do you think?

As an added bonus, I’ve written a brand new, never before published short story called EVERY MAGICIAN HAS TO START SOMEWHERE that will be included at the back of both the e-book versions of Strange Magic and the paperback. It’s a fun little slice of nastiness about a young magician that I think you’ll like. I had previously written a tie-in novella for Strange Magic called Peeler, which features people from the novel in the story but I loved Peeler so much we’ve released it as a separate book on it’s own, as well as included it in the soon to be released short story collection Vol. 3 called FLESH & BLOOD.

Strange Magic is ready to go. My fabulous publisher Adam Geen has just uploaded the files for the e-book and the book should start appearing on Amazon within a few days. Naturally, the trade paperback version will follow as soon as possible.

All my best.

Gord

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