Blood Ties by Gilbert M. Stack

My novel Blood Ties is on sale for 99 cents for the next two weeks on Amazon and it’s always free on Kindle Unlimited.

 

https://www.amazon.com/Blood-Ties-Gil...

 

I don’t usually tell people this, but when I first started thinking about the plot for my novel, Blood Ties, I was considering writing a horror comedy. I’ve read several and I thought it might be quite amusing to have my protagonists attracting the romantic interest of a number of supernatural creatures—the werewolf, the vampire, even a zombie. Naturally, the true nature of these creatures would scare the heck out of them, but I could envision a lot of potentially hilarious scenes where the reader knew what was really going on and the protagonist didn’t as things moved toward the hot and heavy. Unfortunately, when I actually considered writing those scenes, I rediscovered one really big problem. I’m not actually very funny. What I am very good at is creating realistic characters and building great suspense and all the actual plotting led to an increasingly tense story that might have a moment of levity or two, but wasn’t anything like the horror comedy I first envisioned.

 

That’s not a bad thing. I find that most horror comedies I read aren’t actually all that funny and I’d hate to think that I was rolling on the floor laughing at a scene which made everyone else roll their eyes and scratch their heads. So, I doubled down on the serious plot and created a spooky tribute to the archetypes of horror and urban fantasy—vampires, werewolves, ghosts, zombies, and even a touch of Things Man Was Not Meant to Know. Throw in an ancient castle on the border of Transylvania and a previously unknown relative with nothing good on his mind and you have all the elements you need to stay up late at night reading with all the lights on as you struggle to determine just why it is that a relative is a terrible thing to waste.