Beyond A Dark Door: 4 Unnerving Tales of Monsters, Misfits & Men (Press Release 3/15/14) Fresh from the success of last year’s collection of spooky short stories, Beyond the Pale: 5 Arresting Tales of Love & Other Hauntings, Multi-award winning author K. Patrick Malone returns with a collection of eerie short novels that cross the narrow threshold of the human psyche into the terrifying sideshow on the other side. Beginning with the criminally diabolical tale of The Malefactor to the spooky western bedtime story of Ol Uncle Jesse & the Haunting Refrain (New England Book Festival Winner 2013), through the shockingly cerebral centerpiece of The Ascent of Eamon ODowd and culminating with the magically mechanical finale of A Toolbox for Mister Jimmy (San Francisco Book Festival Award Winner 2013), K. Patrick Malone once again proves that nothing is ever what it seems as we travel through the complex labyrinth of the human soul. The Stories: The Malefactor- Cray Stark has spent most of his life behind bars for any number of crimes, but they never got him for the big stuff, not until those college girls; his masterpiece, and the one that put him on death row at Angola prison. But even Angola couldn’t hold Cray Stark. With police dogs close on his trail, Stark has no time to waste. Cold and wet with swamp mud, he conveniently comes across an innocent enough looking old house hidden away behind a grove of trees where he finds the Rousseau family and takes them hostage. But something seems out of step. They’re edgy, nervous, even beyond what one might expect from having a notorious killer in their house. Could it be that Peter and Miranda Rousseau have a secret of their own? A secret so frightening that not only are they not afraid of Stark, but are relieved by his appearance in their home. Well, readers, Cray Stark is about to find out when he comes face to face with the question: what happens when evil meets its match? And the horrifying answer he finds locked behind a bedroom door at the end of the long, dark hall upstairs. Tis some visitor,’ I muttered, ‘tapping at my chamber door -Only this, and nothing more’.” The Raven, Edgar Allen Poe (1845) Ol’ Uncle Jesse & the Haunting Refrain- Ol’ Jesse Plankenstoop is the definition of unskilled labor, only they didn’t call it that in the old west. But now with the creak of middle age in his bones, Ol’ Jesse seems to be slowly approaching that old cowboy adage of riding off into the sunset, until something very unexpected happens. After being unceremoniously tossed out on his rear-end from the Fat Cactus Saloon for cheating at cards, Jesse takes out on his only friend and faithful companion; his trail weary paint girl pony called Bohemia when they stumble across an abandoned homestead out in the Arizona desert. Seeing it as a refuge from sleeping on the unforgiving desert ground, it isn’t long before the eerie feeling Jesse got when he first rode up takes on alarming new dimensions leading to what may, indeed, be his last round-up. “From this valley they say you are leaving. I will miss your bright eyes and sweet smile, for you take with you all of the sunshine that has brightened our pathways a while.” Red River Valley (1879) The Ascent of Eamon O’Dowd- A literary mystery taking place in both the present and the 1920s follows Kate Roderick, a magazine journalist, in pursuit of her lifes dream of being a serious non-fiction writer. But when Kate is offered the opportunity to create a 1920s Broadway Theaterati coffee table book tracing of the life of Pulitzer prize winning playwright Eamon ODowd, she discovers that there is much more to his story than she ever could have anticipated; a mysterious missing year in the playwrights life. Ostensibly expatriated to Paris after the disaster of his second play, Kate accidently discovers that Eamon ODowd was in reality nowhere near Paris, nowhere near Europe, and nowhere near...himself. With The Ascent of Eamon O’Dowd, Malone has created what may rank as his most technically sophisticated work to date keeping readers enthralled until the very last word with its finely drawn characters and edge-of-your-seat mystery as they become entwined like double helix of human creativity in an attempt to answer the age old question: Does art imitate life or does life imitate art? And what happens when the two collide. Where did you go, Eamon? And what did you do there? A Toolbox for Mister Jimmy- Jimmy Delaney is an outcast, a junk dealer who lives hand to mouth on a daily basis, literally. One of the great unwashed and undiagnosed, Jimmy is a train wreck of a human being. Forced by unseen torments to live by his wits on the outskirts of a modern society, he sells junk at flea markets so he can eat, increasingly degenerating as he grows older, unwittingly spiraling towards a shadowy future of living in darkened stairwells or under bridges if things dont change. But things never change for people like Mister Jimmy; not without help, not without a miracle, not without...a tool box? But not just any tool box, a very special tool box, indeed. With an ending that would make The Twilight Zone’s Rod Serling stand and applaud from the Great Beyond, Malone proves once again that he can bring the unexpected, make the hair stand up on the back of our necks, and make us re-evaluated who we are behind our daily masks of the ordinary. Take a bow, Mister Jimmy! Your time has finally come. “Invisible things are the only realities.” So be brave, readers, dare yourselves to reach out for the knob, turn it slowly and peek inside, but hold on tight as you find yourselves hypnotically drawn, step by uneasy step, into the fascinating and frightening places that lie...beyond a dark door. “There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.” -Aldous Huxley
Posted on: Wed, 26 Mar 2014 22:31:05 +0000
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