Michael Richan's Blog, page 10

First Chapter of The Blackham Mansion Haunting!

The Blackham Mansion Haunting releases July 24, 2015, one week from today! You can pre-order it from Amazon; they often distribute it a day early.

In the meantime, the first chapter of the novel is now available for immediate reading right here at michaelrichan.com.

Join Winn, Deem, David and Carma as they explore the abandoned, dilapidated remains that hold frightening secrets of the past!

The Blackham Mansion Haunting now available for pre-order!

The next book in The Downwinders series, The Blackham Mansion Haunting, is available for pre-order now at Amazon!

Order it today to receive it July 24th (or maybe July 23rd, if Amazon behaves as usual and sends it one day early!)

The book description:

Blackham Mansion was built next to a graveyard for a reason. Spiritualists who gathered there to make contact with ghosts knew the deceased were only a few feet away. Over the years, they became very successful at rousing the dead and inquiring about the afterlife.

Too successful.

Deem, a gifted nineteen-year-old, learns that the long-abandoned mansion holds secrets she must investigate. She becomes wrapped up with the unusual house located downwind, where years ago the brunt of Nevada’s nuclear testing fallout rained down from the skies. As a result, Blackham Mansion isn’t any ordinary haunted house. The entities inside — some helpful, some monstrously hideous — are things she’s never dealt with before. Her friends Winn, Carma, and David try to help, but the forces inside the house overtake them all.

Winn and Deem come face to face with a terrifying reality: Be careful what solutions you hope for; sometimes the cure is worse than the disease.

The Blackham Mansion Haunting is a fast-paced mystery with an unusual twist on the paranormal. It is the fourth book in The Downwinders series, part of The River universe. Fans of The River series will find the unpredictable ghosts and mutations of the River even more frightening and terrifying in this place where surprises lurk around every corner, and deception is the order of the day.

PRE-ORDER YOUR COPY TODAY!

An Update

Hello! It’s June already! Where’d spring go? Next thing you know we’ll be unpacking the Christmas ornaments. The older I get, the more time accelerates. I wish someone had told me about this when I was younger. Maybe they did and I wasn’t listening.

Anyway.

Two bits of news, the first book in my new series, The Dark River, has completed its final edit and is in the hands of Amazon. They bake it for several days before they ship it out, so it’ll be nice and hot. It’ll be released on June 12, but if you pre-order it now, there’s a chance you’ll get it June 11. Some people reported receiving It Walks At Night the day before its official release. The book is called A, but I’ve listed the title as The Dark River: A, since just A seemed a little too short to be recognized as a title. I’m very excited about the book, and the future of the Dark River…such an intriguing place. I’m looking forward to spending some time there with Derick.

The second bit of news is about the next Downwinders book. No official title yet, though I’ve had one in the oven for a while, and if it comes out nice, I may use it! I’m just over half-way through writing it, and enjoying every minute of it. I love it when a book surprises me and takes a turn I didn’t expect. (“How can that happen?” you ask? “You’re writing it!” you say? Well, I don’t really know how it happens, it just does, and I enjoy the hell out of it when it does!) Winn, Deem, Carma, David and Lyman are all back, engaged with a haunted house in Southern Utah that has deep, dark secrets. If you haven’t signed up for my new release email list, please do, and I’ll send you an email when it’s available! If I’m lucky, it’ll be released in July.

That’s all from me for now. Time to pull the cover off the barbecue and start summer! I hope yours is great, and thanks for following!

Mike

 

Final day to pick up Blood Oath, Blood River free!

Today is the last day to pick up Blood Oath, Blood River for free, and The Impossible Coin for just 99 cents at Amazon! If you haven’t yet jumped into this series, now is excellent timing!

New Series: More about The Dark River

Those of you who have read The Haunting at Grays Harbor have heard about The Dark River.  It’s the place Roy was adamant about, insisting that Steven promise he would never go there. If I say much more, I know I’m giving spoilers for that book, so I’ll stop right there.

It turns out, though, that The Dark River is a place many gifteds DO go, and it’s as addictive and depraved as Roy feared. It’s a bizarre, dark landscape with strange people and evil creatures. Roy is right; most who go there wind up there, permanently lost. It’s best to stay away — far away.

Derick doesn’t have a father figure with the gift to warn him away. In fact, he isn’t even gifted — but everything about the River intrigues him, including the Riverview Motel where people routinely die or are found in a coma. The Riverview is near the access point to the Dark River, and gifteds use the motel as a way to park their bodies while they explore it. Sometimes they come back; many times they don’t.

When he worked as a cop, Derick saw a lot of strange things in his case work. Aside from the routine depravity of his fellow human beings, he occasionally encountered something that was baffling and unexplainable; every cop ran into these things, and they knew to steer around them and spend their time on leads that would amount to something rather than going down the rabbit hole. Derick was able to ignore those things while he worked, but now that he was retired, the unexplained details bugged him, and he wanted answers. With the help of The Achernar Group, he found them.

Things really changed for Derick when he discovered a way to enter the River. It’s the holy grail of The Achernar Group: a non-gifted person able to enter the flow, and Derick’s discovery transcended their knowledge and ability, placing him in a position they want and envy.

It also gave him an opportunity to explore, and he soon followed the gifteds who used the Riverview Motel on their way to the Dark River. His instincts as a cop informed him of the risks of the place. He’d experienced enough addiction and sickness in his career to know a bad situation when he saw it, and he recognized the downside of the Dark River almost immediately, knowing if he didn’t learn how to avoid it, he’d become one of the infected and depraved right along with the others.

Instead, he found a way to make money off it. Desperate family members, worried that their children or siblings had become lost in the Dark River, were willing to pay handsomely for someone to save their loved one from the clutches of the place. Fortunately for Derick, he also discovered a way to force other people back, out of the Dark River and back into their bodies, provided they hadn’t turned. He charged a tidy fee for his services, and he developed a reputation as someone you could count on to go in, find your loved one, and yank them back. It usually didn’t require more than a cursory excursion into the Dark River; most of the wanted didn’t go far in and were merely “rushing”, indulging in the intense pleasures the Dark River offered. It was easy to incapacitate them while they were wrapped up in ecstatic bliss and kick them back to the real world with the aid of a device he’d acquired. It was a nice little business for a retired cop living on a pension. He was saving up to move to Belize.

So this is where we find Derick when the novel A begins. He’s been to the Dark River enough to complete the contracts he’s been hired for, and he has resources inside the place that he can use to get the job done. But he’s smart enough to stay out of most of it, concentrating on just getting in and getting back out…before he becomes infected.

In A, the contract Derick takes doesn’t go as planned, and he finds himself dragged into the depths of the Dark River, where firestorms descend from the sky like fiery tornadoes, torching the land and everything in their path, and forces who prey off the sickness of others target him as a threat to their enterprise. Soon he’s wrapped up in a problem much deeper than he ever intended, spending far more time inside the Dark River than he expected, exposing himself to the flies, and the infection…

Still, as careful as he is to avoid it, The Dark River is such a fascinating place. So much more fascinating than the real world.

A is intended as the first book in a new series, set within the River universe. There are a myriad of connections to details in The River and The Downwinders series, so if you’re familiar with those titles, you’ll find familiar things here, too. It’s got a different vibe than those two series, with new characters and a truly bizarre setting.

It’s my intention to rotate between these three series for a while, alternating with each book as I’ve done the past year with The River and The Downwinders. I hope you’ll jump in and explore the Dark River with me, even though Roy wouldn’t approve. It’s going to be a really twisted ride that I hope you enjoy!

Subscribe to my blog instead of Facebook — here’s why

You now have the ability to subscribe to my blog and be notified via email whenever there’s a new blog post. This is in addition to the New Release email list, which I try to keep focused only on new titles.

You might already be aware of this, but Facebook does not share the things I post there with all of my Facebook followers. Their algorithms kick in, and I have to pay to try to get my message out to you, even if you’re following me! And, to make it worse, if I’ve posted a cover to my book, they often won’t take my money at all: they have a rule about graphics that contain more than 25% text…they won’t promote them. Many of my book covers have at least 25% text, so they routinely shoot me down! What winds up happening is that you never receive my post in Facebook, no matter what I try. That sucks!

The best way to hear from me is by subscribing to my blog. See the widget at right (if you’re on a PC) or at the bottom (if you’re mobile.) I don’t post a ton, so you won’t be inundated, and you can always unsubscribe if things don’t work out.  Of course I don’t share my email lists with anyone and they’re kept private.

I’ve turned on Comments for my blog, so feel free to leave your thoughts here instead of Facebook!

 

 

I’m interviewed by Raz N Dark Podcast

I spent a fun hour with the gang at the Raz N Dark Podcast last night. They interviewed me about The River series books and writing in general. If you’d like to listen in, here’s the link. The interview begins at the 64:30 mark.

Raz N Dark Podcast #50 Michael Richan interview

We go on and on about horror movies for a good chunk of it. I could talk about horror movies all day. The nice thing is, so can they!

I was particularly honored to receive a “Scare Achievement Award” from Raz. He doesn’t scare easily, and apparently The Bank of the River really creeped him out. I post it here with pride.

I think it’s pretty obvious from the interview that I really enjoyed chatting with them. Their podcast covers a wide range of topics, much of the time focusing the indie markets, so if you enjoy the episode, consider subscribing!

 

It Walks At Night released today! Available now at Amazon!

Release day of a new title is a big day for me… wondering how my readers will enjoy the next book, tracking sales to see if all the Amazon pre-orders went out as planned (they always seem to, but I track it anyway) sending out announcements, etc. I remember the day I released The Bank of the River in 2013, waiting to see what would happen. I checked the numbers at the end of the day, and I had sold exactly… zero. So I checked the next day, and had sold…another zero!

Now, thanks to River fans and incredibly generous readers, many, many more than zero move out on release day! I’m incredibly thankful to the people who continue to buy my books and keep me propelled forward into new titles.

Today It Walks At Night was released, the ninth (!) title in the series. I wanted to take a brief break from the Eximere story line, while still incorporating things that lay the groundwork for future books. It Walks At Night is an adventure set in Eliza’s hometown, Clearlake. I hope you enjoy it, and if you do, please leave a review at Amazon – your reviews really matter to me, and help the series continue!

I’ve got a big announcement brewing, too. New releases are always shared first with my email list, so if you’re not on it, why not sign up? That way you’ll always be the first to know when something new develops in the River.

Thanks again for following and for your support of this series. More titles are coming, and things are going to get… interesting!

 

‘Graves’ released, ‘Blood Oath’ on sale!

To celebrate the release of The Graves of Plague Canyon, the first book of The Downwinders series, Blood Oath, Blood River, is on sale at Amazon for just 99 cents until March 21.

‘Graves’ released, “Blood Oath’ on sale!

To celebrate the release of The Graves of Plague Canyon, the first book of The Downwinders series, Blood Oath, Blood River, is on sale at Amazon for just 99 cents until March 21.