C.J. Faust—
My commitment is to scaring the living hell out of my readers. I'm not down with that whole "scary but not too scary" thing. My book, The Lord of Bones, and the series it introduces readers to, deals with a dark oppressive force so abysmal that those falling victim to it may do anything to find a way out… not unlike gouging out your eyes to avoid a sight you find unbearable to look at. My writing is dark, but not without hope. There will be blood in these books, horror-hounds may rest assured. There will be terror and gore, but not without intelligence. I’m not into senseless torture-porn either.

Other things I’m committed to include diverse and fascinating characters, the beauty of language, and the exploration of the darker reaches of the imagination from angles we haven’t seen before. I do write a wicked sex scene (laugh), so you can expect to encounter some of that sprinkled about.

But what you’ll discover when you crack open this book (or click into its digital form on your e-reader)—is what I found when I began writing the book(s) roughly two years ago. Having written in many sub-genres of horror, you don’t always know exactly which way a book will lean at first. This one, at its core, wants nothing more than to scare you… it’s old-school hard-core horror but for the new generation.

Checkout the expanded summary below, for a deeper dive into the three sets of characters that converge in The Lord of Bones.

Camille Adams is an attractive thirty-two-year-old divorcee. A working class single mother, she’s well-adjusted to her life: happy; still good friends with ex-husband, Dan; and carrying a bottomless love for their son, Christian—a love so deep that it colors the very fabric of her soul.

But nine days ago, everything changed in Camille’s life.

Before then her son had been ordinary enough; a very intelligent, if slightly withdrawn eight-year-old boy. Now, suddenly and seemingly out of nowhere, severe night terrors have taken hold of the boy. He wakes each night screaming bloody murder. And the craziest part of it all is the feeling of dread that now hangs over their home. Is it a mother dreading her child’s next shrieking episode? Yes, sure. But deeper still, Camille can’t shake the sense that the man, the thing, whatever it is her son sees in his room at night is really there. She hasn’t see it with her own eyes, but—dear God in Heaven—she starting to be able to feel it.

And her son’s fits, the episodes, are getting worse.

And what Camille is only just beginning to realize, is that she’s tumbling into a nightmare wide awake. Nine days ago, when the sun set for her and her family, whatever appearances might have been given by the illusion of the next day’s coming light, in the shadow of The Lord of Bones the sun never truly rose again. Not for them.

It’s the other side of town, the moneyed side; a world away in one manner of thinking, but this horror doesn’t care about your bank roll. What it craves is your suffering, your blood, your soul.

David Franklin, age twenty, would seem to have everything going for him. Looks. A rich father. A tightknit group of seven friends that includes his on-again off-again girlfriend, Meagan; and his best buddy, Winston, with whom he’s even in a local band.

But David has a secret. Something happened to him now nearly a decade ago that almost took his sanity as an eleven-year-old boy, that years spent on a shrink’s couch seemed to have vanquished from his conscious mind, that lately has come back with a vengeance.

“He’s always there, Winston.” Urgent. Desperate. “Wherever I am, so is he. When I walk down the halls at school he’s at the end of every hall, halls that don’t connect. He’s in the alleys between houses. Every house. He’s in the backs of crowds when we are up on stage.”

For David, telling Winston his childhood horror story and the absurdity of its reawakening is one of the hardest things he’s ever done. But he and his friends are about to learn what horror really is. It’s a long hard road that out of Hell leads up to light, said Milton; but perhaps longer and harder still, is the road rolling down to the pit as you’re being dragged, kicking, clawing and screaming all the way. The seven friends self-styled as The Hot Seven are about to learn how long and hard that road really is.

And The Lord of Bones is keeping Hell hot for all of them.

Spunky, black, and self-assured, Shireen Davis wakes on the morning of Friday, October 7 with a sense of expectancy—an intuition. She will meet someone today and this meeting will change her life. Shireen is a psychic, recognized among “the sighted” as being especially gifted; so, such intuitions are not unusual for her.

She thinks: Today’s the day, hot damn, I’m meeting Mr. Right! So, she dresses for the occasion. Sharp, but not slutty. And she waits for the universe, for the good Lord, to guide her to the destination she trusts he has in mind.

By late afternoon that destination has turned out to be the local Tyson’s super market. A strange place for a chance encounter that may lead to wedding bells, but Shireen—who has seen ghosts since childhood, who mediums with the dead and burns white sage to clean her client’s homes of negative energy—has seen many strange things. She takes it in stride. But Shireen has never seen anything like what’s waiting on her today.

A troubled eight-year-old boy, Christian Klein (his father’s last name), is waiting to meet Shireen inside the Tysons. His dad is there too. But neither of them is alone.

Today Shireen is going to come face to face with something she hasn’t seen before: real evil, and like Nietzsche’s abyss, evil can’t be seen, not even a glimpse, without it’s dark eye also seeing you. Then, once it has your scent it never forgets and never let’s go.

The man Shireen will meet, the thing that will alter her life forever, is The Lord of Bones.