Josh Kent's Blog, page 5

Award winning artist – Jason C. Eckhardt – thanks for the cover!

One of the bigger joys of this book was getting to see the drafts of the cover art for the first time.

Artist Jason C. Eckhardt gave light and shadow to people and places who had only ever existed in my mind!��Just think of how it might feel to suddenly be looking at the face of someone you’d only ever pictured in your head… Thanks for an amazing, classy cover, Jason!

Jason��articulated��the essence of the novel – and through��his skill I recognized immediately the��face and form of my main character, Jim Falk, surrounded by the��rickety homes, stark wilderness, and suspicious��citizens of Sparrow.

I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Eckhardt, but he’s a talent to be reckoned with. Check out his many accomplishments here.����AND here!

“ Jason is an illustrator who got his start with the legendary Necronomicon Press back in the late 1970s and has been at it ever since. His work has also appeared in publications by Dell Magazines, Arkham House, Hippocampus Press and Centipede Press, to name a few. Jason is also five-time winner of the Best Editorial Cartoon of the Year award from the New England Press and Newspaper Association. A life-long devotee of the writings of H.P.Lovecraft…”

��– I couldn’t find the author to contribute the write up on Jason Eckhardt, please let me know who I can credit.��Facebook group��https://www.facebook.com/LovecraftbioGN/posts/698171633598964

Below is an alternate cover that he created. This cover shows one of the many action��sequences in the narrative

–��Jim Falk engaged in combat with “The Spook” – ��Fantastic stuff!

Thanks for your time, energy, and major talent, Jason!

��“Sparrow 2″ copyright 2015 Jason C. Eckhardt

Witchy Updates for March 2015

I am so humbled and thrilled at the excitement I am hearing about The Witch at Sparrow Creek. I had some shipped to me this week and the book is really a gorgeous��presentation.

If you’re still waiting for the eBook version – so are we! Amazon is taking its time with getting things populated and completed, but we’re happy they’re carrying the title. As soon as I hear about our eBook, I will let you all know right away.

This year, I will be working on a number of projects, including my original script for the��stage version of John W. Campbell’s “Who Goes There” with Ohio City Theatre Project – hopefully to be on stage in October or November this year! See my earlier post about the script here.

Hippocampus has been hard at work and is producing a whole group of new books this year and the first quarter of the year has been a boom of activity for my publisher. Check out the site and the new Lovecraftian delights –��http://www.hippocampuspress.com/

As the novel moves out from the publisher in the next few weeks, there will be a number of reviews incoming from Publisher’s weekly and Critical Mass��– possibly more. Also, there will be press releases sent to some local newspapers and other local book sellers.

Importantly, if you read (or have read) The Witch at Sparrow Creek, I invite you to write an honest review on Amazon.com – or post your thoughts here on my blog.

In the meantime, I will be working on the sequel to The Witch at Sparrow Creek. ��Thanks again to everyone for the outpouring of support for my book!

The Witch at Sparrow Creek – updates and acknowledgements

The book’s available NOW at Barnes and Noble and Hippocampus and Rising Shadow��– SOON����it will also be available in eBook and Kindle format. I will post as soon as I know.

There are so many, many of you who were part of this book, whether you knew it or not! It’s hard to make these kinds of lists because you might miss someone, but the greatest thing about writing is that you can always edit!

I especially want to thank my editor, ST Joshi, who took the time to read through an early manuscript and honored my work by telling me the truth about it and sending me in the right direction.

Also, my publisher, Hippocampus, and its founder, Mr. Hussey, for the��kindest guidance, care-taking, inspiration, and for introducing me to the glimmering,��shadowy landscape��of weird fiction.

My wife, Sarah, for her enormous love, her constant, logical questions, for being my original editor, and for loving me throughout, despite my meltdowns and bad impersonations.

My dad, for telling me specifically to change the title and for being my friend since my first memories..

My sister, for loving me so much and for teaching me that witches can be very��good people.

My mom, for instilling in me the love and respect for��the native people of this land and the way they respect the creation. And for being the first��reader of my story, for editing, and for telling me about the parts that scared her so much she had to put it down! I kept all those parts,��Mom!

Orton Jones, also for editing, reading and generally supporting his odd, but lovable son-in-law through awkward times, canasta, and adventures in Greece.

Mary Jo, for always making me laugh and keeping me in line and beating me at canasta.

Janet Kent, for being so, so excited about the book! And for always making me feel at home.

Amy Williams, for reminding me that I’m a writer, not letting me forget it, and helping me become the kind of person who has a book published and smiles more often.

Clemente Ruiz for cussing me out when I really needed it more than anything else.

Mr. Watts, for being a man of action.

Moxxee, and the gang��over there that makes my coffee, like everyday. It’s the best coffee in the world! It really is, thank you!

Dr. Tom Robinson, for helping me become such good friends with CS Lewis, and for lighting the Way.

Mr. Mudd, for always making me feel like a celebrity, for lifting��me toward heaven – and for cherry cobbler made on the campfire.

Everyone who played Beyond the Supernatural, Heroes Unlimited, MERP, TMNT, Vampire the Masquerade, Shadowrun, Planet Zeon, Hamlet 1992, Lazer Tag, and everything else. The clackity-click of a d20 on a kitchen��table top is still my favorite sound – Gary, Jeremy, Rusty, Travis, Chuck!

 

 

 

 

 

The Witch at Sparrow Creek

The Witch at Sparrow Creek by Josh Kent


Paperback (eBook available soon at Amazon.com)
356 pages
ISBN 9781614981237
Cover art by Jason C. Eckhardt

As a boy, Jim Falk watched helplessly as Old Bendy’s Men dragged his father into the darkness. Now, Falk is lured by strange dreams to finish the incomplete work of his father, which was to rid the land of evil. He is hampered by his fears and addictions, but he leans on his father’s former archivist, Spencer Barnhouse, to help him secure ancient secrets and weapons for the fight. His dreams of a strange redhead and a dark figure lead him to the town of Sparrow, where he encounters a magician, a pack of wolves, and shadowy things lurking in the forest. When the local preacher tells him of a witch in the woods, his journey takes an even stranger turn.

“The Witch at Sparrow Creek is a scintillating novel—filled with lovingly drawn characters, a profound sense of place, and an abundance of supernatural terrors that will leave every reader enthralled. It is one of the finest first novels that the field of weird fiction has seen in many years.” —S. T. Joshi

“The Witch at Sparrow Creek is is a resurrection of the genre, pulling those of us who care about such things back to a better time when these novels meant something — and, it helps to usher in a new generation of fans who will soon find themselves enthralled with this small, almost fictional town and its too real people. In Kent’s debut novel, we are introduced to not only resonating horror  but to a long and promising career for the author.” — Joel L. Watts, author

 

The Witch at Sparrow Creek – shipping very soon -

The Witch at Sparrow Creek by Josh Kent


Paperback (eBook available soon at Amazon.com)
356 pages
ISBN 9781614981237
Cover art by Jason C. Eckhardt

As a boy, Jim Falk watched helplessly as Old Bendy’s Men dragged his father into the darkness. Now, Falk is lured by strange dreams to finish the incomplete work of his father, which was to rid the land of evil. He is hampered by his fears and addictions, but he leans on his father’s former archivist, Spencer Barnhouse, to help him secure ancient secrets and weapons for the fight. His dreams of a strange redhead and a dark figure lead him to the town of Sparrow, where he encounters a magician, a pack of wolves, and shadowy things lurking in the forest. When the local preacher tells him of a witch in the woods, his journey takes an even stranger turn.

“The Witch at Sparrow Creek is a scintillating novel—filled with lovingly drawn characters, a profound sense of place, and an abundance of supernatural terrors that will leave every reader enthralled. It is one of the finest first novels that the field of weird fiction has seen in many years.” —S. T. Joshi

“The Witch at Sparrow Creek is is a resurrection of the genre, pulling those of us who care about such things back to a better time when these novels meant something — and, it helps to usher in a new generation of fans who will soon find themselves enthralled with this small, almost fictional town and its too real people. In Kent’s debut novel, we are introduced to not only resonating horror  but to a long and promising career for the author.” — Joel L. Watts, author

 

 

Pre-Order The Witch at Sparrow Creek!

You can now pre-order my debut novel, The Witch at Sparrow Creek: A Jim Falk Novel published by Hippocampus Press. Click here to pre-order.

The book is slated for release in February of 2015. While you can pre-order the paperback now, the e-book will be available in February if that’s your style.

Praise for The Witch at Sparrow Creek

“The Witch at Sparrow Creek is a scintillating novel—filled with lovingly drawn characters, a profound sense of place, and an abundance of supernatural terrors that will leave every reader enthralled. It is one of the finest first novels that the field of weird fiction has seen in many years.”—S. T. Joshi, author of I Am Providence – The Life and Times of H.P. Lovecraft

The Witch at Sparrow Creek – Synopsis

As a boy, Jim Falk watched helplessly as Old Bendy’s Men dragged his father into the darkness. Now, Jim Falk is lured by strange dreams to finish the incomplete work of his father, which was to rid the land of evil. He’s hampered by his fears and addictions, but he leans on his father’s former archivist, Spencer Barnhouse to help him secure ancient secrets and weapons for the fight. His dreams of a strange red head and a dark figure lead him to the town of Sparrow where he encounters a magician, a pack of wolves, and shadowy things lurking in the forest. When the local preacher tells him of a witch in the woods, his journey takes an even stranger turn.

The Witch at Sparrow Creek

The specialty publishing company Hippocampus Press will take my first novel THE WITCH AT SPARROW CREEK (WITCH) to print in 2015. This was such terrific news. My editor S.T. Joshi has helped to shape this book over the past several years and he has been incredibly supportive of the novel. There were many other folks who have read earlier version of the book and helped me to keep going. It took me too long to finish because there were periods of many months when I didn’t work on the book at all because of other things going on.

The novel is the first in a series. WITCH follows the story of Jim Falk, an archetypal “monster hunter” who is searching for his lost father. The world that the novel is set in is a kind of mystical Appalachia of legend where witches and demons are very real – although people are beginning to disbelieve in such things. The mechanics of the larger world and forces will be deeply explored in the series to follow this first novel.

Jim Falk is pushed forward to finish the incomplete work of his father, which was to rid the land of evil spirits. But Jim was not a good student and soon became a drunk and an addict. He returns to his father’s work only because he is being haunted by strange dreams of a red headed woman and a dark figure. He seeks out his father’s former archivist, Spencer Barnhouse, to help him figure out what to do. Jim follows a trail of visions to the town, Sparrow, where he meets Violet Hill, who is the woman in his visions. She is being stalked by a “Spook”, which he then vows to hunt down and kill.

The novel was originally inspired by this book Appalachian Ghost Stories and Other Tales, and another by the same compiler, A Wayfaring Sin Eater and Other Tales – while these stories were not adventure stories, they sparked my imagination toward writing a book set in a legendary Appalachia. Appalachian Ghost Stories and Other Tales was a book that a friend of mine and I had stolen from a local library when I was a teenager, later I would marry the niece of the author, never making the connection until I saw the book on her father’s shelf. (Yes, that really happened.)

While Appalachian Ghost Stories was a sending off point for my imagination, the story was also largely influenced by paper and pencil roleplaying games that I played with high school friends. If they ever read the book, they will see names and themes that they recognize, but the story is all together new.

This book is not intended to fit in with the many more commercial novels that stock the shelves and the digital book world today. Those books are great reads and have so many imaginative, entertaining, and rich worlds to offer, but they are in their essence formulaic. While all story telling needs a formula, WITCH tries at something different.

My influences as a writer include (and this is by no means an exhaustive list) Robert E. Howard, C.S. Lewis, Stephen King, Lord Dunsany, Phillip K. Dick, and George Macdonald. I love these authors because the writing is not only exciting and adventurous, but finds means to something transcendent through language. What pushes readers in this direction can often be poetic and sometimes nonsensical turns and twists, uncanny characters, or even (gasp) dead ends in narratives. Pick up a Grimm’s Fairy Tale compendium and you will see the repetitions and the nonsense and find that this is what creates endurance for tales and allows them to breathe and grow and exist through the years. It’s kind of a big thing to reach for, but with these influences, I felt that I needed to stick to these beautiful older traditions and ways of storytelling.

At the same time, I fully realize that this is 2014. There are so many new ideas floating about and new ways that readers can absorb stories that I wanted to write with that in mind as well. What you’ll find in the pages of my book (hopefully) is a story that presses forward in odd turns and twists, but that does push forward – and also one that is poetic, thoughtful, and nonformulaic.

Thanks to everyone who’s had a part along the way – I look forward to seeing the proofs.

“Thing” coming to Ohio City Theatre Project 2015

The script that will hopefully go up in 2015 as part of Ohio City Theatre Project’s 2015 fall season had a lot of re-writing. I didn’t realize it. There were probably four or five versions of the script. Honestly, they were getting worse. It’s hard because you get so excited about doing something like this – like tackling something that’s been tackled in so many variations before – you kind of explode. You have to read everything , watch the movies, listen to the radio plays – and then research Antarctica… don’t forget about the deep sea creatures that can resurrect in the thaw.

There’s three different film versions, comic books, short stories inspired-by, radio plays and unrealized screen treatments of John W. Campbell’s “Who Goes There”. The reason that it’s inspired so many other progeny, makes the story itself a little like the Thing from the system with the bluer sun.

It hits on a lot of creepy psychological problems – and where big budgets and CGI can grab for gore, the stage adaptation had to do something a little different. Campbell envisioned an alien that could not only consume and mimic human beings, but could also perfectly replicate the psychology, expression, and basically, the Thing is the cosmos’ greatest actor.

The aspect that the stage opens up to is the psychic nature of the creature – Campbell posited the Thing’s abilities to pervade even dreams. It doesn’t just penetrate and skillfully steal the biological system of another creature, it subsumes the psychic parts, the mind, the soul, as it were. Pushing the script into this area was fun.

It was fun too bringing Campbell’s 1930’s manly men into the far-flung future of egalitarianism, swear words, and the playful banter we’re all so enamored of that spilled into the big screen through Ghostbusters, Aliens, and Pulp Fiction. If we’re going to tell these stories in 2014, it’s a blessing to us all that Campbell made the soil rich enough to grow such varieties as these.

I’m confident that after the workshop, we’re going to have something that’s fresh and fun, and hopefully makes your skin crawl, up the wall and out through the ventilator system.

Unfamiliar Jackal

A Kabyl folk tale tells of a mother ewe who brings hay to her children each day and speaks a password at the entrance to their cave so that they would open the door and let her in. Check out the story here

The password is, “The jug between the legs and the hay between the horns.” She says, “This is so you can recognize me by what I say and by my voice”.

When a jackal hears this and sees that he could sneak in, he learns a way, through a wise man, to alter his voice so that he can eat the ewe’s children. Read the story and its easy to hear the echoes in the Grimm Fairy Tale and in Jesus’ words. After you’ve read a few of these, talking animals can become nothing to get so excited about. In fact, when we read any story at all, we can almost immediately accept that animals might start speaking at some point, in fact, we kind of expect it.

Why have talking animals in stories? Not only does the ewe speak, she has a recognizable voice, and a code system.

Couldn’t and wouldn’t these messages arrive to us just as easily if all the characters were human? It would be something simple for the tale to read with a murderer who wanted to murder the children or even a rival tribesman who might stuff them in a sack and carry them into the night. Instead we have lambs and wolves (or jackals). Notice too, the introduction of the shepherd as a friend to the ewe in this story in particular.

When we remove the familiarity from a thing that is common, we find ourselves able to re-experience that thing. To notice it again, or possibly in a new way.  One role of story telling is to make the unfamiliar familiar by making the familiar unfamiliar (and vice versa).

“Truly, truly, I say to you, he who does not enter the sheepfold by the door but climbs in by another way, that man is a thief and a robber. But he who enters by the door is the shepherd of the sheep. To him the gatekeeper opens. The sheep hear his voice, and he calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has brought out all his own, he goes before them, and the sheep follow him, for they know his voice. A stranger they will not follow, but they will flee from him, for they do not know the voice of strangers.”

This figure of speech Jesus used with them, but they did not understand what he was saying to them.”

John 10:1-6

What is it about the voice that is so important in these stories, so important that the animals must have voices? So important that the Jackal would subject himself to torture to have that same voice (here the voice of the shepherd).

Why does the false voice bring ruin?