Fleshtrap: Pre-order on Amazon today
Hello, everyone. As Christmas, Kwanza, Hanukkah, and your various pagan holidays of choice advance upon us all, I bring glad tidings of stuff you can buy your loved ones this season! My horror novel Fleshtrap is now available for Amazon pre-order, for sale on December 17th. Did you read this book before as an online serial? Do you want to read it again? Do you want to read it for the first time? Do you want to support indie authors and/or very attractive people on the internet? Do you want to send something gross and uncomfortable to your mother-in-law? If you answered yes to any of these questions, keep reading. And even if you answered no, keep reading anyway. I’m going to change your mind.
What is Fleshtrap?
It’s my debut novel from Post-Mortem Press, of course. I wrote it 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. But, to be fair, it’s about a lot of things. It’s a book about damage, family secrets, and how trauma can leave scars so deep that they affect the world at large. It’s about Casey Way, a guy who’s been haunted by visions of his dead father for the last twenty years. His father, a pedophile, was murdered by his stepmother Alyona in revenge for abusing Casey’s stepsister Mariska for much of their lives. The trauma of these events have left Casey burdened with guilt, and over time Casey has dealt with almost debilitating insomnia, which causes violent hallucinations of people that he sees with holes cut into their chests. Sure, sometimes he sees these people’s faces on missing persons fliers, but he isn’t about to tell anybody about that part. There’s only so much crazy Casey can really deal with.
What’s the synopsis?
From Amazon.com:
Casey Way has been haunted by visions of his dead pedophile father for the last twenty years, tormented by hazy recollections of his father’s murder at the hands of his stepmother. The trauma has left Casey burdened with guilt, which has manifested in debilitating insomnia and violent hallucinations. As the anniversary of his father s murder approaches, his step-sister Mariska takes him back to the scene of the crime: their childhood home, to confront their past and finally get some closure.
Instead, something follows Casey back out into the world, something ugly, violent, familiar. It begins a vicious spiral of insanity as people around him begin disappearing and dying, hiding behind the faces of Casey s loved ones. Somehow tied to his father s murder, Casey begins digging into his fragmented memories for an answer. What he finds instead brings Casey face-to-face with his greatest fears as he struggles to end the nightmares that have haunted all of their lives.
What’s so different about this book?
Different is such a loaded term, but I’ll play ball. Fleshtrap doesn’t have the most conventional of protagonists, and that was a conscious choice on my part. The plot follows the exploits of Casey, his boyfriend Joel, and Casey’s stepsister Mariska as they try solving this evolving mystery from different angles. They’re complicated people with complicated relationships, and each of them have a lot of baggage to work through over the course of the book. But ultimately this is a story about people who overcome horrifying obstacles in order to defeat monsters, real and imagined, internal and external. Yes, this story is creepy, and yes, this story is a bit gruesome at times, but I wanted this book to be as poignant and painful as it is disturbing. Ultimately I think that’s where its strength lies, and I hope people can appreciate that.
Why should I read it?
It’s horror, but it’s also mystery. It’s a family drama, but it’s also a love story. There’s gore, but there’s also thoughtful discourse on the relationships between fathers and sons, mothers and daughters. I wrote this as the horror story that I wanted to see in the world, a combination of several genres and concepts that people could relate to. I can only hope that others will feel the same way.
Are there any excerpts available online?
Just the little bit of the first chapter that I’ve posted on Tumblr. From the first chapter:
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.
And the middle of the book:
Casey licked his dry lips and reached out to trace the edges of the padlock, sealing the box shut as though it had never been broken. He regretted his decision not to call Joel. Joel would have had something good to say, something warm and soft and reassuring. He would have made this alright. Now there was no calling him, because Casey knew Joel had no answers that he couldn’t find for himself inside the box.
Retrieving a butter-knife from the silverware drawer, he pried at the lock, twisted the blade in the shoddy catch to lever it open. The lock gave out in a jerk and scrape, and holding a breath he pulled back the lid. The smell of rotting meat struck Casey first, like the stink of an animal carcass left in the sun. Inside the metal box was a lining of sweating flesh, thin and heavily veined by blue arteries. Fingernails and tiny canines like a baby’s milk-teeth flanked all sides of the box in staggered rows, circling the throat at its center. A wide gullet of corded musculature, flapping open and shut in a wet slap of flesh and smelling like dead animal and intestinal juices. Slap, gurgle, sigh.
Gagging, Casey slammed the box shut and scrambled back across the kitchen, tripping, falling. The room lurched and narrowed his field of vision into a motion-sick tunnel. His pulse beat against in his temple until his sight cleared, grabbing the edge of the counter to drag himself upright. He disregarded the decorative pot of spatulas and spoons that he had sent across the floor, grabbing instead for a kitchen knife from Joel’s cutlery set and brandishing it at the box. The box didn’t move. The sounds of its digesting gullet thinned into a tight sucking noise. Another sigh and the box sounded pleased with itself.
Sound good? Good. Pre-order your copy on Amazon.com and receive 25% off. It’ll make a great holiday gift. And by great, I mean awkward. But, hey, it’s the thought that counts.
