Cover Reveal & Giveaway for Halloween Season by Lucy A. Snyder. Trick-or-Treat with Us for Cool Gifts! RT pls. #halloween #halloweenseason #RDSP

Every Day is Halloween

Halloween decor is in select stores, and though we are still “enjoying” summer, October is just around the corner. Today I have a cool cover reveal of a new Halloween story collection and giveaway as part of Trick-or-Treating adventure, which means some of you may be dropping by from social media or another site, but let me give a little background for my subscribers as well.

Raw Dog Screaming Press (RDSP) is an award-winning indie press of horror, fantasy, sci-fi, crime, and more that I’ve worked with in regards to PR and publicity for several years via my business Hook of a Book. One of the exciting authors I get to work with published by them is a fellow Ohio author, the multi award-winning Lucy A. Snyder. On Oct. 5, 2020 we are excited to say that RDSP is releasing a collection of stories by Snyder for Halloween called…. you guessed it, Halloween Season!

Whether Halloween in person festivities are canceled this year due to Covid (so do your duty so we can all have fun this Fall, will you?) or not, you can always partake in some online escapades. For instance, let’s start a bit early with RDSP in a digital rounds of trick-or- treating to celebrate the reveal of the seasonal cover created by artist Lynne Hansen of Halloween Season!

How Trick-or-Treating Works – 

There are five houses to visit on this block: author Lucy A. Snyder, cover designer Lynne Hansen, mine here at Hook of a Book, co-owner of RDSP and author John Edward Lawson, and Raw Dog Screaming Press. Visit any of them first and feast your eyes on the amazing cover created by Hansen, then pick up a different “treat” (or giveaway) from each post also featuring the cover reveal. Keep reading to check out my giveaway and the other stops below…. after we meet the artist and see the cool cover.

But first….

Meet the artist, Lynne Hansen – 

RDSP was looking for a cover that captured all things Halloween and turned to artist Lynne Hansen. “I have over fifteen years of experience in marketing and promotions including art and design,” Hansen said. “I started creating book covers when my husband Jeff Strand decided to make his humorous horror novel The Sinister Mr. Corpse available as an e-book. Once people saw Jeff’s next e-book Wolf Hunt, I started to receive requests to design covers for other authors. Now I get to tell other people’s stories through the art of the book cover and I love every minute of it.” For more info about Lynne head over to LynneHansenArt.com and make sure to browse her gallery.

So without further ado, here’s the cover!

Cool and festive, right? Excited as much as I am now?

Halloween Season launches October 5th but you can preorder now!

Order from RDSP • Order from Barnes & Noble • Order from Amazon

Media Requests – 

If you are a member of the media or reviewer, I’m also happy to put you on the list for e-arcs or print copies, just let me know! I’ll also be sending requests, but do feel free to let me know also either in the comments or to my e-mail. Also, I’m scheduling Lucy for select interviews as well.

Now look at this FULL SPREAD! 

About Halloween Season – 

Halloween is the most wonderful part of the year for many of us. For dedicated fans, the season begins when the leaves start turning autumn colors and doesn’t finish until Hallowtide ends in November. With it comes a whole lot of fun: scary movies and stories, haunted houses, seasonal sweets, spooky decorations, costume parties, and of course trick or treat. But Halloween is also a deeply spiritual time for some; it’s an opportunity to remember and honor loved ones who have passed on.

Master storyteller Lucy A. Snyder has filled her cauldron with everything that Halloween means to her and distilled it into a spell-binding volume of stories. Within these pages you’ll find thrills and chills, hilarity and horrors, the sweet and the naughty.

One of the best things about Halloween is you don’t have to be yourself. So go ahead and try on a new mask or two … you may discover hidden talents as a witch, a pirate, a space voyager, a zombie fighter, or even an elf. This is the perfect collection to celebrate the season of the dead or to summon those heady autumn vibes whenever you like. You may even find a couple of tales that evoke a certain winter holiday that keeps trying to crowd in on the fun.

In the worlds within this book, every day is Halloween!

Trick or Treat Giveaways – 

Now for the goodies! Thanks for participating in our trick-or-treat cover reveal!

My Giveaway –

1) I’m offering to one (1) US winner a copy of one of my favorite autumn poems I’ve written, previously published online at Spillwords Press, BUT this would be a hand-lettered original, probably with a little original art on the border to follow the theme. It will be signed. This is one of a kind! Please leave a comment below or e-mail me (hookofabook at hotmail dot com) to be entered.

2) For both US and international, if you e-mail me, I will send all who contact me a .pdf for you to download that you can print of the original mentioned above. It will have my digital signature.

This giveaway I open from July 23 to July 31, 2020. Entries after that won’t be considered but feel free to comment anytime.

Head to ALL the Stops –

Visit all the houses on the block to collect all the treats. Here are the current stops and treats:

• Stop #1 Lucy A. Snyder (excerpt from Halloween Season)
• Stop #2 Cover artist Lynne Hansen (printable bookmark)
• Stop #3 Raw Dog Screaming Press (postcard promo pack)
• Stop #4 Hook of Book publicist Erin Sweet Al Mehairi (that’s me! You’re here. See above about a signed, hand-lettered Halloween poem)
• Stop #5 John Edward Lawson (Halloween card and story)

Lucy A. Snyder, Biography –

Lucy A. Snyder is the five-time Bram Stoker Award-winning and Shirley Jackson Award-nominated author of over 100 published short stories and 14 books. Chaosium will release her novel The Girl With the Star-Stained Soulsometime in 2021. She also wrote the novels Spellbent, Shotgun Sorceress, and Switchblade Goddess, the nonfiction book Shooting Yourself in the Head for Fun and Profit: A Writer’s Survival Guide, and the collections Garden of Eldritch Delights, While the Black Stars Burn, Soft Apocalypses, Orchid Carousals, Sparks and Shadows, Chimeric Machines, and Installing Linux on a Dead Badger. Her writing has been translated into French, Russian, Italian, Spanish, Czech, and Japanese editions and has appeared in publications such as Asimov’s Science Fiction, Apex Magazine, Nightmare Magazine, Pseudopod, Strange Horizons, and Best Horror of the Year.

With Michael Bailey, Lucy also co-edited the critically-acclaimed collaborative dark fiction anthology Chiral Mad 4. When she’s not writing, she’s faculty in Seton Hill University’s MFA program in Writing Popular Fiction and also works as a freelance developmental editor in a suburb of Columbus, Ohio. You can learn more about her at www.lucysnyder.com and you can follow her on Twitter at @LucyASnyder.

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Thanks for stopping! Did you say TRICK-OR-TREAT!? Don’t forget to enter to win.

Review: Little Paranoias by Sonora Taylor #PromoteHorror #HorrorisHealthy

Little Paranoias, Review –

I enjoy Sonora’s short story, flash, and poetic writing. I’ve read her full-length novel Without Condition but something draws me to her shorter pieces. I was excited to receive her collection Little Paranoias! I think we write somewhat similar: saying much in small spaces, similar themes – musings on death or the afterlife, surprise twists and endings, shocking amid the normal, and involving nature in our writing. I suppose the things I like to think about that end up in my writing is what I like about her short pieces because reading her pieces make me ponder life as well (when they aren’t shocking me).

I especially liked the opening piece “Weary Bones,” which takes us on a journey with skeletons who are, for lack of a better word, alive. It really was ingenious and made me think about how much we do forget our loved ones, in death, even in spirit, that we seem to need voice, warmth, skin. It was well-written and thought-provoking but also gave me a sadness. I only wished this story was longer and had more meat on its bones because it was over too soon and I feel there could have been more. I really felt I knew the character Brandon so well so soon, which is hard to pull off in shorter pieces.

“Crust” spoke deeply to me in a few hundred words and that’s all I’m going to say, but wow did it feature what I struggle with every single day. “Cranberry” scared the shit out of me. That’s some pent up rage and writing that holds nothing back. Many of the other stories dealt with murder of some sort whether a perpetrator, a family member, a spouse, the general populace. I am beginning to wonder if Sonora is a serial murderer in her head. I’m joking (maybe….haha). I can dig it as some of my stories often off men and foe. Many pieces had surprise endings, often they showed clearly life issues which created characters crossing boundaries into raw, primal emotion, and others were creatively done and had such a unique flair.

I actually was completely unnerved and uncomfortable with “Stick Figure Family” – I mean, it actually made me ball up in anger and question a lot, but in a way I suppose that just means it was well-written enough to urge reaction of me as most horror stories should do.

Though I really enjoyed “Hearts are Just Likes” quite a bit – I found it inventive and fun and cool – my favorite story was “Quadrapocalypse,” which has the character starting off on the DC metro, and after, the story splitting off into four ways with four different scenes. I love techniques like this! Also, the nature lover and activist I am really enjoyed the theme of this one. Be good to nature, or it may get you back!!

My least favorite was the last story, “Seed.” I wanted to like it, due to its themes of nature, and I DID like parts of it and the overall plot and thought behind it, but I don’t like too much erotic content in my reads. Also, it was just unexpected because there wasn’t any in the rest of the book but by the end I “got” the animal correlation of it and why. I’d probably not have put it as the last piece, since that should be the blow away read. I’d have chosen “Quadrapocalypse!”

Overall, I really had fun reading a few of these stories a night during this annual spooky reading month! They made me think, made me cringe, made me scream, and even shocked me. Bite-sized morsels of fiction that feel like a meal, maybe your last meal or one that haunts you, but fiction that’ll chill you to your bones no matter the temperature. Highly recommended!

Little Paranoias: Stories, Synopsis –

Is it a knock on the door, or a gust of wind?
A trick of the light, or someone who’ll see what you’ve done?

Little Paranoias: Stories features twenty tales of the little things that drive our deepest fears. It tells the stories of terror and sorrow, lust at the end of the world and death as an unwanted second chance. It dives into the darkest corners of the minds of men, women, and children. It wanders into the forest and touches every corner of the capital. Everyone has something to fear — but after all, it’s those little paranoias that drive our day-to-day.

Little Paranoias: Stories is Taylor’s third short story collection and fifth overall release. Featuring cover art by Doug Puller, the collection features twenty short stories, flash pieces, and poems. The collection features an assortment of dark tales, including “Hearts are Just ‘Likes,’” a contemporary reimagining of “The Tell-Tale Heart” originally published in the award-winning anthology Quoth the Raven (ed. Lyn Worthen, Camden Park Press).

Little Paranoias: Stories is available now in e-book and paperback (released: October 22, 2019) and exclusively on Amazon.

Purchase Here

Sonora Taylor, Biography –

Sonora Taylor is the author of Without Condition, The Crow’s Gift and Other Tales, Please Give, and Wither and Other Stories. Her short story, “Hearts are Just ‘Likes,’” was published in Camden Park Press’ Quoth the Raven, an anthology of stories and poems that put a contemporary twist on the works of Edgar Allan Poe.

Taylor’s short stories frequently appear in The Sirens Call, a bi-monthly horror eZine. Her work has also appeared in Mercurial Stories, Tales to Terrify, and the Ladies of Horror fiction podcast. She is currently working on her third novel. She lives in Arlington, Virginia, with her husband.

Find Sonora Online

Visit Sonora online at her website!

Facebook

Goodreads

Blog

Twitter: @sonorawrites

Instagram: @sonorataylor

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Note: I received a copy of this book from the author in exchange for a review/author blurb. This didn’t affect my opinion.

Celebrating Breathe. Breathe.’s One Year Anniversary: THANK YOU!

My ONE YEAR ANNIVERSARY of the publication of my debut dark poetry and short story collection, Breathe. Breathe. from Unnerving, came around in October 2018!!! It was fun to celebrate and almost like I had just published it all over again! I honestly have no idea how so much time has passed so quickly, and though everyone else is probably sick of hearing me talk about it, I don’t think I ever will be – even when I publish my next book or collection! Breathe. Breathe. will always be special to me because it’s an extension of me and a big part of me. I’ve enjoyed celebrating every milestone!

Gratefully, people have still been embracing it this year and letting me talk about my stories, my inspirations, and sharing their own thoughts on the book in continual reviews. In just October and November, in celebration of the anniversary, I wrote several articles I’d love to share here. Coincidentally, I had some wonderful new reviews come in as well. I’d love to share them with you below! It’s definitely not a full list from the year, but it’s my goal to soon have up my media page to include all the links.

Stay tuned too, as I have three interviews and a few more articles I’m finishing up that will appear this month (December) or January. Soon I’ll hopefully be able to share more news about publications and writing projects coming up!

Articles

On Ginger Nuts of Horror – Five Scary Books to Read for Halloween

On InkHeist – Vahalla Lane: We’re All About Revenge Here

On The Horror Tree – My Writing Inspiration: Charlotte Perkins Gilman

And…..

Brian Fatah Steele’s Site – My Writing Process: Wait, There’s a Writing Process?

Interview

7 Q’s with Brian Fatah Steele

Reviews (Click on blog title for full review)

Kendall Reviews – “If the idea of reading a collection of poetry is what is preventing you from checking this out, give your head a shake. If it’s the lack of corpses and skulls on the cover, have a friend smack you silly. This is dark, dark stuff and it should be mandatory reading by everyone in the horror community.”

Red Lace Reviews – “There’s a lot of content in this title, and all of it was thought-provoking. I may not be a connoisseur of poetry, but I appreciated the heart-wrenching emotion poured into every addition, and the concluding short stories also interested me.”

Howling Library – “Altogether, Breathe. Breathe. is a fantastic collection of poems and stories, and—at risk of sounding cheesy—is a real breath of fresh air. Erin shows a natural talent for writing, and I am so appreciative of the way she bared her soul to the world in her work here.”

Down in a Book – “This collection beautifully showcases the beauty in the worlds we create (either physically or in our own heads) and also reminds us of the sickening cruelty inflicted onto others. A great collection for anyone who enjoys reading work on the darker/haunting side, and who may want to feel a little vengeance a little once in awhile!”

The RAC Magazine (Nov/Dec Issue) – “Erin’s words were deeply moving.”
(This Reader Author Connection Magazine is subscription only.

And…

just a few days ago, Emily from Book.Happy posted her favorite debuts she read in 2018 (all 4 and 5 star reviews) and included Breathe. Breathe. in her stack. I was honored by the company I was keeping and thankful for her support.

If you’d like to order Breathe. Breathe. I’d be honored. Please let me know if you’d like to purchase a signed print copy by e-mailing me at hookofabook@hotmail.com.

Or you can order in e-book and print from Amazon, read on Kindle Unlimited, or order print from Barnes and Noble.

Thank you so very much for your continued encouragement and for celebrating with me. More soon!

SLUSH, a Collection of Works by Glenn Rolfe, and Edited by Me, Releases Today!

It’s almost Halloween! But, for now it’s LAUNCH DAY for SLUSH, the collection of horror works by Glenn Rolfe  for which I had the honor of serving as EDITOR! Glenn and I had sooooo much fun working on this together. Late nights, early mornings, evenings, weekends, and we pulled it all together in just a month!!

It’s a collection that will make you cry, cringe, and maybe freak out, but it’s so worth reading. Some of the short stories have been previously published, but updated, some are short pieces such as a poem or a micro-work, but most share a similar theme. Many either take you back in time to teenage years or deal with death and grieving, but all truly make you feel something. I was so pleased that I got to write the foreword to kick off the collection, so you’ll read all my thoughts there….

Oh, also just in time for Halloween, there is a cool new story never before published towards the back with a nod to the season, it’s creepy enough for late night ghoulish reading.

We hope you consider purchasing and let us know if you liked it by leaving an honest review! The cool cover is by graphic artist Jason Lynch.  So psyched, check it out!

Amazon Purchase Link

ANNNNDDDDDD……..

Also, get Glenn Rolfe’s The Haunted Halls, his debut novel, on sale!

Amazon Purchase Link

Glenn Rolfe, Biography~

Glenn Rolfe is an author, singer, songwriter and all around fun loving guy from the haunted woods of New England. He studied Creative Writing at Southern New Hampshire University, and continues his education in the world of horror by devouring the novels of Stephen King and Richard Laymon. He and his wife, Meghan, have three children, Ruby, Ramona, and Axl. He is grateful to be loved despite his weirdness.

His first collection, SLUSH, will be available for Halloween 2014.

His novellas, ABRAM’S BRIDGE and BOOM TOWN, will be published by Samhain Publishing in 2015.

His debut novel, THE HAUNTED HALLS, available now from James Ward Kirk Publishing.

Look for his punk rock band, The Never Nudes, on Amazon and Facebook.