Ellie Jordan, Ghost Trapper Book Blitz {Guest Post & Giveaway}

I'm so thrilled to be participating in the Ellie Jordan, Ghost Trapper Book Blitz to celebrate J.L. Bryan's new, adult horror/paranormal book! Below you can learn all about this new book, read a fun guest post, and enter to win an ebook copy...

Ellie Jordan, Ghost Trapper #1

 by J.L. Bryan 

September 19th 2014

Genres: Adult, Horror, Paranormal

Ellie Jordan’s job is to catch and remove unwanted ghosts. Part detective, part paranormal exterminator, Ellie operates out of Savannah, Georgia, one of the oldest and most haunted cities in North America.

When a family contacts her to deal with a disturbance presence in the old mansion they’ve recently purchased, Ellie first believes it to be a typical, by-the-book specter, a residual haunting by a restless spirit. Instead, she finds herself confronted an evil older and more powerful than she’d ever expected, rooted in the house’s long and sordid history of luxury, sin, and murder. The dangerous entity seems particularly interested in her clients’ ten-year-old daughter.

Soon her own life is in danger, and Ellie must find a way to exorcise the darkness of the house before it can kill her, her clients, or their frightened young child.

Goodreads / Amazon / Barnes & Noble

Five Signs Your House May Be Haunted

by J.L. Bryan

Things go bump in the night.  You feel like someone is always watching you.  You think you have a ghost, but maybe it’s a just a creepy squirrel scrambling around your attic at night and staring at you through the windows.  How can you tell for sure?

The editors of Ladies’ Haunted Home Journal are back with an easy guide to determining whether a paranormal presence infests your house!  Before calling the ghost trappers, consider whether you have any of the following signs:

Cold Spots: One or more areas in your house might seem much colder the space around it.  This may be a corner, closet, or other out-of-the-way spot.  You may be excited to learn that when you feel the cold spot, you’re not just in the presence of a restless dead spirit, you’re also touching it!  You’re almost inside the ghost, and it’s kind of inside you.  Pretty neat.  Important note: A cold spot inside your refrigerator or freezer may be caused by the appliance itself.

Strange Sounds: You may hear moaning, groaning, thumping or crashing late at night.  Make sure it isn’t an elderly neighbor or relative bumbling around your house.  If you hear voices threatening you with death or dismemberment, you might consider the benefits of spending the night at a Motel 6.

Mysterious Motion: Plates slide off the counter.  Doors open or close by themselves.  The chandelier leaped down from the ceiling, flew across the room, and tried to kill you last week.  You’re beginning to think something may be amiss.  First, make sure there aren’t any logical causes for these problems, such as keeping your counter too greasy, or a broken hinge in the door, or that idiot who installed your chandelier.  If you can’t find an explanation, odds are you’ve got a ghost (or a poltergeist, but let’s not split hairs).

Absurd Disappearances: Your keys disappear from your end table, only to be found in the fish tank.  Your good silver vanishes, piece by piece, and you discover all of down in a mysterious back corner of the basement.  It’s either a family member with bizarre hoarding tendencies or a mischievous ghost.  Either way, you’ve got an annoying problem on your hands.

Full Apparitions: If you have seen a ghost appear and disappear, you probably have a ghost.  We don’t really have an alternate explanation for this one.  Call your local paranormal exterminator today!

We hope these tips will help you sort out whether your house is haunted or your family is just weird!  If you have further questions, please read our pamphlet: My House is Haunted – What Now?  Good luck with that ghost!

From someone who has lived with ghosts for years, I think these are all really good signs of a haunting to look for...for reals ;)

 

website * goodreads * twitter * facebook

Ellie Jordan, Ghost Trapper is the first book in a new series by J. L. Bryan, the author of the Jenny Pox series and other novels.  He lives in the very hot state of Georgia with his family and no ghosts, as far as he knows.

Sign up for J.L. Bryan’s newsletter to receive a free ebook of short stories and hear about future releases in the Ellie Jordan series and other new books.

Win an ebook copy of

Ellie Jordan, Ghost Trapper!

J.L. Bryan has generously offered one e-copy of his new book for one of you cupcakes.

DETAILS

-open to anyone who can read ebooks

-ends 10/3

-must be 13+ to enter

-winner will be emailed and must claim prize within 48 hours

Fill out Rafflecopter form:

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Review: Inferno Park by J.L. Bryan

Inferno Park

by J.L. Bryan

August 15, 2014

Carter was only twelve when he witnessed the disaster that killed more than a hundred people at Starland Amusement Park. Five years later, Carter’s hometown is no longer a busy Florida panhandle resort, but a slowly dying town full of empty motels and attractions rusting behind chains and padlocks.

Now something evil stirs in the ruins of the old amusement park...something with an alluring siren song drawing visitors into the dark mysteries of the forbidden world behind the gate. Something with an appetite for restless, yearning souls. 

Carter reluctantly returns to the old park in the company of a new girl in town, who is obsessed with urban decay and pop-culture ruins, and discovers the evil at work. To stop it, and protect the children of the town, Carter will have to face his oldest and deepest fears.

Goodreads / Amazon Kindle / Amazon Paperback

J.L. Bryan can write the hell out of a book and, with Inferno Park, he has once again created a highly entertaining, smartly crafted, utterly addicting read! My first thought when finishing this book: “That was some awesome fucked up shit!”

The Starland Amusement Park, in the panhandle of Florida, was home to a horrific catastrophe. Hundreds of people, many of them children, were tragically killed and twelve year old Carter witnessed it all. Five years later, the small seaside town has not recovered. What was once a bustling tourist destination, full of Mom & Pop businesses, is now a fastly dying town. Seventeen year old Carter just wants to finish high school and get the hell out of there...but something sinister in the ruins of the park has other plans for Carter and the teens in this dwindling town. Something evil lurks in the park and it’s up to Carter and new girl Victoria to save the day...if they can stay alive long enough, that is!

What a spooktastic, fun, twisty read! Bryan holds nothing back in Inferno Park; it is filled to the brim with chills, thrills, and bloody good times! And the book starts with a wicked bang right in the first chapter. Seriously, this first chapter has one of the highest body counts, like, EVER! My face reading this chapter was pretty much all this:

And the shocks and twists never stop coming! I was all “There’s no way he’s gonna do that...eeep, he totally just did!” and by the time I’d think there’s no way Bryan would “go there”, we’d be driving past “there”, manically waving goodbye.

Genuinely creepy and eerie, with real frights, Bryan creates a captivating and spine-tingly atmosphere. Inferno Park is quite the cinematic reading experience, and is reminiscent of fun, watch-through-your-fingers horror movies. The quickly dying seaside town makes for an effective, isolated setting, while the haunting ruins of Starland Park, aka Inferno Park, is deliciously scary. Bryan has intricately built this amusement park of horrors, adding so much awesome detail; from the various rides to the game booths and food stands, Bryan fully immerses his readers in this world.

Carter and Victoria are both likable, realistic teenage characters that Bryan puts through absolute, compete hell! Carter, Victoria, and a myriad of other characters are victims of a truly evil baddie. This startling and unexpected antagonist hacks, stabs, chops, burns, decapitates, and every other crazy painful word you can think of, through his victims in a gorefest of awesomeness!

Twisted and twisty, Inferno Park throws some wicked curve balls and shocking revelations your way...so be prepared for anything and everything!

My Final Thoughts: Inferno Park is a thrilling read full of fun scares, excellent world-building, engaging characters, and one helluva baddie! Fans of horror movies aimed at teens and over-the-top slasher flicks will enjoy this book immensely. Oh, and I may NEVER go on an amusement park ride EVER again 0_0

MY RATING

Website I Facebook I Twitter I Goodreads

J.L. Bryan studied English literature at the University of Georgia and at Oxford, with a focus on English Renaissance and Romantic literature. He also studied screenwriting at UCLA. He lives in the metro Atlanta sprawl with his wife Christina, where he spends most of his day serving the toddler and animal community inside his house. He is the author of the Paranormals series and the Songs of Magic series.

The Girl From The Well Blog Tour {Interview and Giveaway}

I'm so stoked to have The Girl from the Well Blog Tour stopping by today with my Interview with Rin Chupeco and a Giveaway...

The Girl from the Well

by Rin Chupeco

August 5, 2014

Sourcebooks Fire

You may think me biased, being murdered myself. But my state of being has nothing to do with the curiosity toward my own species, if we can be called such. We do not go gentle, as your poet encourages, into that good night. 

A dead girl walks the streets.

She hunts murderers. Child killers, much like the man who threw her body down a well three hundred years ago.

And when a strange boy bearing stranger tattoos moves into the neighborhood so, she discovers, does something else. And soon both will be drawn into the world of eerie doll rituals and dark Shinto exorcisms that will take them from American suburbia to the remote valleys and shrines of Aomori, Japan.

Because the boy has a terrifying secret - one that would just kill to get out. 

The Girl from the Well is A YA Horror novel pitched as "Dexter" meets "The Grudge", based on a well-loved Japanese ghost story.

Goodreads / Amazon / B&N / IndieBound / Book Depository

What three words best describe The Girl from the Well?

creepy, unnatural - and fierce

Grab a copy of The Girl from the Well and answer the following:

favorite chapter?

The last chapter. I had no idea how to finish the novel until I was practically there, so I was surprised at how well the ending suited the story.

favorite page?

The first page. Everything you need to know about Okiku's personality has been laid bare there.

favorite setting/place?

Mount Osore is one of the places in Japan that comes up in the novel. Imagine sulfuric hot springs, an isolated Buddhist temple, and a sea so wide and blue and inviting - until you realize it's too poisonous to swim in. As a mountain of death it is both picturesque and grotesque, even by Japanese standards.

flip to a random page and give us a 1-2 sentences teaser?

"It sees the boy, but not with eyes. From behind its mask it is smiling, but it has no mouth."

What inspired The Girl from the Well? How did the story come to be?

Once upon a time, I was an office flunky making my living dissecting technical manuals, and doing so at an office inside a building that had seen better days. Since technical manuals require a lot of overtime, and because other people working in the building also required overtime, and because I looked like a cleaned up version of The Ring girl, I wound up scaring a lot of guys and girls every time I left the building at the same time they did. My idea of a 'good' ghost came about then (mostly because when they grew accustomed to it and started teasing me about looking like the undead, I protested that I was the good kind of undead.)

I started thinking about how a novel would read like from the perspective of what in other books would have been the story's antagonist.

Can you tell us a little bit about your characters Okiku and Tarquin? What sets them apart from other YA characters? What makes them special or unique?

Though not always the case, females in novels are often depicted as being more emotional than their male counterparts. With The Girl from the Well, the roles were reversed. Okiku is the brains and the detached observer of events. Tark is more emotional and snarky – he's also the sarcastic one of the duo. I'd also written Okiku as someone who considers herself a supporting character rather than as the story's heroine (despite being one); hence, her fascination with other people's lives (Tark's and Callie's, especially) and why she is hesitant about relaying much about her own, though she's the book's narrator.

The Girl from the Well is bound to awesomely spook many readers...what was the last creeptastic thing (book/movie/tv show/etc) that kept you up at night or gave you the chills?

I am a huge Asian horror movie fan, and recently there's this Thai horror film that came out called 3 am that scared the crap out of me. It's actually made up of three short stories. The first is about a group of sisters who run a wig shop, who become haunted when they are sold human hair belonging to someone who had committed suicide. The second concerns a mortician who falls in love with a corpse bride he is watching over. The third involves a group of office workers playing pranks on each another, until they go too far. I love these small budget films, because they take the time to build the creepy atmosphere and weave it around their stories.

Fill in the blanks:

I’m really awesome at playing video games. This is not going to be a skill set that's going to make me rich any time soon, but it's always been my way to de-stress after a long day. I am probably going to be one of those eighty year old grandmas playing Grand Theft Auto XXXVIII.

I’m really embarrassed to admit that I have never properly learned how to ride a bike. In my defense, driving in Manila can be a frightening experience. Riding a bike is even worse.  

The last great book I read was Snuff by Terry Pratchett

If you were to create and bake a cupcake inspired by The Girl from the Well, what would it look and taste like, and what would you call it?

If we're being realistic, it would actually taste like crap and look like a cat had thrown up in it, because I'm a horrible baker. But if we're basing this on the theory that I can bake edible things, the cupcake bases would resemble a little well made of matcha green tea wrapped in gray fondant. The frosting would be swirly dark chocolate made to look like long, creepy hair. I'd call them Matcha Malice cupcakes.

Thank you so much for stopping by, Rin!

website * goodreads * twitter 

Despite an unsettling resemblance to Japanese revenants, Rin always maintains her sense of hummus. Born and raised in Manila, Philippines, she keeps four pets: a dog, two birds, and a husband. Dances like the neighbors are watching.

Her work, The Girl from the Well, is a YA psychological horror novel due out in Fall 2014, pitched as "Dexter" meets "The Grudge". She is represented by Nicole LaBombard and Rebecca Podos of the Helen Rees Agency.

Win a copy of The Girl From The Well!

The peeps at Sourcebooks Fire have offered up one copy for one winner.

DETAILS

-US only

-ends 8/26/14

-must be 13+ to enter

-winner will be emailed and must claim prize within 48 hours

-Word Spelunking is not responsible for lost, damaged, or stolen prizes

Fill out Rafflecopter form:

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Book Trailer Reveal: Girl from the Well by Rin Chupeco

I'm excited to help reveal the eerie new book trailer for The Girl from the Well by Rin Chupeco, which releases today...

The Girl from the Well

by Rin Chupeco

August 5, 2014

Sourcebooks

You may think me biased, being murdered myself. But my state of being has nothing to do with the curiosity toward my own species, if we can be called such. We do not go gentle, as your poet encourages, into that good night. 

A dead girl walks the streets.

She hunts murderers. Child killers, much like the man who threw her body down a well three hundred years ago.

And when a strange boy bearing stranger tattoos moves into the neighborhood so, she discovers, does something else. And soon both will be drawn into the world of eerie doll rituals and dark Shinto exorcisms that will take them from American suburbia to the remote valleys and shrines of Aomori, Japan.

Because the boy has a terrifying secret - one that would just kill to get out. 

The Girl from the Well is A YA Horror novel pitched as "Dexter" meets "The Grudge", based on a well-loved Japanese ghost story.

Goodreads / Amazon / B&N / Book Depository

website * goodreads * twitter 

Despite an unsettling resemblance to Japanese revenants, Rin always maintains her sense of hummus. Born and raised in Manila, Philippines, she keeps four pets: a dog, two birds, and a husband. Dances like the neighbors are watching.

Her work, The Girl from the Well, is a YA psychological horror novel due out in Fall 2014, pitched as "Dexter" meets "The Grudge". She is represented by Nicole LaBombard and Rebecca Podos of the Helen Rees Agency.

Be sure to come back to Word Spelunking 8/19 when The Girl From The Well Blog Tour stops by