This is my current work-in-progress (WIP): a creature-feature horror novel in the realm of Jaws meets The Thing.
Back of the Book Blurb
People keep disappearing in the small town of Gray Harbor, Massachusetts. And when one turns up dead on a local beach, Detective Hector Velaquez is drawn into a web of conspiracy and mystery. But, as each new clue is revealed, he’s forced to recognize something inhuman is at play. What follows is a desperate race to find and destroy a creature from a nightmare before more people die.
Excerpt: Chapter 1
The sun glimmered on the horizon. The man adjusted his cap and sunglasses and took a deep breath of sea air. With his kayak in front of him, he waded into the gentle surf. As soon as he was deep enough, he pulled himself up and into it, retrieved his paddle, and set off across the glassy, empty bay.
Within a few minutes, he found his rhythm, the breeze buffeting his long gray hair where it escaped his Boston Red Sox cap. He hummed a quiet tune in time with the subdued dip of his paddles, making excellent time on his way toward the lighthouse on the jetty across the bay. He made this trip at least three times each week, in all but the worst weather, for nine months of the year. This was his time, as grounding and energizing as the best pot could be.
Something caught his eye, and he fumbled his paddle. Where there’d only been flat water moments before, a woman floated not a hundred feet from his kayak. She wore a red bikini top, dark hair smeared across her face, her body swaying on the gentle swells.
He dug his paddle into the water, turning at speed. He stopped the kayak alongside her and said, “Are you alright?”
She didn’t move. Her blank eyes stared into the sky.
He knew a body could be in a horrible condition after just a few hours in the water, but her flesh hadn’t paled or bloated; she didn’t look like she’d drowned. Still, something about the body looked wrong to him. The limbs seemed… soft.
Feeling a little sick, he prodded the woman’s shoulder with his paddle. No response. He debated heading back alone to the beach to call the police rather than wrestling with a corpse in the water.
But as he turned his head toward the shore, he heard a splash. Whipping around, he found the woman staring back at him.
A strange moment passed. “Ma’am?”
He reached out and touched her shoulder, and the woman’s pale flesh clouded with the color of a deep bruise. The shoulder lost its shape and squirmed out of his grip. It oozed its way around his wrist and up his arm until it latched onto his bicep. He cried out before it yanked him into the water, flipping his kayak.
Over frantic bubbles, the lime-green hull bobbed on the surface of the bay in time to the slow current.
If you’re enjoying the read, Chapter 2 is posted too!
Current Status:
I’ve been working on this book off and on for nearly three years. It’s a labor of love–a story I simply have to tell.
The idea came from a flash fiction piece I wrote based on a random prompt in a Discord server. The image that story evoked stuck with me until I said, “I think I could probably expand this into a cool little short story. Maybe 3000 words or so.” So I did. Except now it’s at 83,000 words and I’m not done yet. 😁
The only reason it’s taken so long to get this far is because I had so many other things in the works, along with real-world commitments that have absorbed way too much of my time. But now, I’m hitting the home stretch and life is finally starting to make way for the birth of this story.
I hope to have the first draft completed by the end of the year. And, since I’m terrible about editing as I go, I expect the first draft to be pretty darn close to final. I already have beta readers reviewing what’s done at this point, and feedback has been excellent.
I’ll probably query it for a while, but I suspect I’ll end up self-publishing it late in 2025. But I’ll keep y’all updated as it progresses.