Publishing news: The book is called Fleshtrap. Let me tell you about Fleshtrap.
Casey Way by Anna Rose
For twenty years Casey Way dreamt without sleeping. He slipped into the spaces between death and waking where his father still walked the streets and behind Casey’s eyelids. There his father met him, in alleyways between city blocks and in the basement beneath the library, tucked into the corners of his apartment and hiding under tables when he wasn’t of mind. It was his father that woke Casey now, dreaming of David Way’s face as raw meat, lips peeled from straight teeth and nostrils flayed open to the bone. He sat down beside Casey on the three-twenty-five cross-town bus with the squeak of plastic upholstery. From his seat, Casey watched sunlight filter dirty-gray through the sweat-filmed glass, a halo around his father’s missing face. He felt nothing, just the hole his father left there.
Fleshtrap is a horror/mystery novel I wrote between July 2010 and May 2011. It ran as a free-to-read online serial from October 2011 to May 2012, with sixty-two chapters and an epilogue. The book has now been purchased by a fairly well-recognized publishing concern who shall remain nameless until the contracts are signed and I get the okay to start running my mouth all over town. (Got to let the ink dry and all that.) But that’s the boring stuff. Here’s the part I wanted to talk about.
Fleshtrap is about damage. It’s about child abuse. It’s about families and secrets. Mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, and the ugly things we all keep inside of us. Sometimes these things take on other forms; they grow beyond ourselves to manifest in the physical world. These things are dangerous. They are predatory. They are made of flesh and teeth and whispers and lies, and they will kill you if you let them. Fleshtrap is all about holes, you see. The holes we make and the holes we let happen to us, and how they will destroy us if we’re not careful.
Casey Way by Ramiro R.
Casey Way hasn’t slept in twenty years. When he does sleep he sees the ghost of his murdered father in every mirror and passing car window. David Way waits nestled under tables and breathing in the corner of his son’s living room like the shadow of the predator he once was. These nightmares are the only memories Casey has left of his father, who exists now only as whispers of bone and flesh. As the anniversary of his father’s death approaches, his stepsister Mariska takes Casey back to confront the demons sleeping in their childhood home. The old house on Mooreland Street has been waiting for them, long-abandoned since the night of his father’s death at the hands of Mariska’s mother, a cathedral of Venus flytraps and ugly memories.
But something is asleep in their old house, something so terrible that Casey doesn’t see it at first. It’s a trap, wearing stolen skins made of flesh and lies and familiar faces. The trap follows him out of the hungry dark to take root in the physical world, where it begins stalking anything it can latch onto. It knows your secrets, your fears, your dirty little memories. If it catches you, it will kill you, and Casey — even though he doesn’t know it yet — is the only one who can stop it.
This is Fleshtrap, coming to you this October.
