Countdown To Angler In Darkness

My first story collection, Angler In Darkness, releases August 1st. Preorders are currently up for the ebook versions, with print to follow.

From the front cover:

[image error]

From the back cover:

EDWARD M. ERDELAC, Author of Andersonville, Monstrumführer, The Van Helsing Papers, and The Merkabah Rider series presents his first collection of short fiction, spanning nearly a decade of fishing in the sunless depths of the imagination, some brought to light here for the first time.

A frontiersman of bizarre pedigree is peculiarly suited to tracking down a group of creatures rampaging across the settlements of the Texas Hill Country…..

A great white hunter is shaken to his core by a quarry he cannot conceive of….

A bullied inner city kid finds the power to strike back against his tormentors and finds he can’t stop using it….

Outraged plumbing plots its revenge….

Here Blackfoot Indians hunt the undead, the fate of nations is decided by colossal monsters, a salaryman learns the price of abandoning his own life, and even the Angel of Death tells his story.

EIGHTEEN ‘CATCHES’ FROM AN ANGLER IN DARKNESS

Now I decided to take a page from Punktown author Jeffrey Thomas’ promotional playbook and post the first paragraph/line of each story, one a day till release. I’m doing it on Facebook as to not inundate the old blog with posts, but I’ll update this page daily with the excerpts so if you’re not an FB person you won’t miss ’em.

Day 1 –

First story up is exclusive to the collection – The Mound Of The Night Panther, about a French trapper who discovers the ultimate fate of the lost Native American city of Cahokia…

Auguste Oudin had come down the Father of All Rivers to Illinois from Quebec three years ago in a forty foot canoe with the Seminarians and Henri DeTonti as a courer des bois, paddling, signing, and trapping for the young priests.

Day 2 –

Today it’s Killer Of The Dead, the first story I ever sold, about a pair of Blackfoot Indians tracking down the gang of vampires who slaughtered their village.

The boy puts his back to the tipis with their warm, glowing bellies, and he feels the smooth, cold stones beneath the trickling surface of the creek with his toes. The water is black but for the fat hunter’s moon reflected lazing amid the wavering stars. He is not afraid to be alone. He thinks the night shadows hide nothing that is not there in the day.

Day 3 –

Today we have Bigfoot Walsh, a weird western about a group of Texas Rangers sent to investigate a series of bloody killings in the hill country, and their tall, shaggy chief scout who, it turns out, is peculiarly suited to the task….

It was a cool spring night when the Texas Rangers rode out of the dark into Fredricksburg.

I remember because the people were out lighting the bonfires on the hilltops, and one of the Rangers, a dirty youth with rusty hair, asked me what they were for.

Day 4 –

Today it’s the first line of Devil’s Cap Brawl, which is about a Central Pacific Railroad crew dynamiting a mountain and releasing an immense creature long trapped within. A mysterious Chinese rail worker comes forward to stop it. It’s a weird western send up of 60’s Godzilla/Gamera movies with a dash of TV’s Kung Fu thrown in….

Joe Blas was so called because his papist upbringing in Drom, County Tipperary, had given him a knack for devising the most ingenious blasphemies anyone on either side of the Sierras had ever heard.

Preorder here –