Category: Books

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The Hook: A Novel Coming March 7

After a lot of work, my first full length novel is almost here. You can pre-order the eBook now or wait until March 7 to purchase it or the hardcover. The details haven’t fully shown up on different purchase sites yet, but that should change in the next week. It will be some time before I have it available in my own personal store. I’ll send out an announcement once I have my copies. Details and purchase links are located below. Thank you for your continued support and I look forward to hearing everyone’s thoughts about my newest book.

Synopsis

It’s 1976 and Ernest Kemp is looking for his wife and daughter. After leaving the US Navy, he finds his way to Hallowell, Maine. He’s an outsider and the townsfolk don’t trust him. Their suspicions increase when someone starts killing children. After being falsely accused and arrested, Ernest teams up with Samantha Belcher as she investigates the murders for the Kennebec Journal.

They discover the murders are ritualistic sacrifices. Ernest and Samantha’s issues rise as bullfrogs roam all over town and three new outsiders resemble women from a 100-year-old news article. Will they find the killers and Ernest’s family before another child dies?

Praise for The Hook

“Pack is deft when it comes to balancing the plot and the characters, and the dynamic between his intriguing, flawed characters is authentic. Fans of gripping supernatural thrillers will be glad to sink their teeth in this one.”
~ Prairies Book Review

“Pack creates a vivid sense of doom, deftly portraying an intriguing world of brutal slayings, centuries-old curses, deadly rituals, otherworldly beings, and ordinary people who are caught between these anomalies. Readers will be on the edge of their seats until they turn the last page.”
~ BookView Review

“Penned with a gritty grace that blurs the line between reality and something far stranger than fiction, the surprises build slowly with a deft layering of suspense, weaving together different genres and themes, and fronted by an engrossing protagonist.” 
~ Self-Publishing Review

Pre-Order on Amazon
Pre-Order on B&N

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Book Recommendations and an Interview

I don’t post updates to my blog much anymore and I hope to correct that in the coming year. I wanted to share some cool stuff I have going on, but the first thing I want to say is, the first draft of my novel is finished. I have already begun the editing process and I hope to have it ready and published no later than early March. More details will come your way as I move closer to publishing. I will have a page here on my site dedicated to the new book once all the things are ready to go. And now for the exciting stuff.

I recently learned about a new website called Shepherd. It is another site about books and things. They’ve only been around for a couple years, and they are still very small, but have a big heart. You should check them out just because, but also, you should check them out because I recently posted a book recommendation list to their site. What kind of books would I recommend? Well ones that are similar to my own writing of course. These are my recommendations for The Best Novels Where Real-Life Horror Meets the Supernatural.

This was a lot of fun to do and all I had to do was recommend books I’ve read. Too easy. The books I recommended are the ones on display in the top image of this post. If you want to know more about them, check out the list on Shepherd. They also have lots of other lists (they call them bookshelves) on their sits such as The Best Supernatural Books. Or you can find any other type of list (bookshelf) that suits your reading preferences. Keep an eye on Shepherd because I think they will get pretty big in the next few years.

To keep things more local, since I live in Tucson, AZ, I had the opportunity to get interviewed by Shoutout Arizona back in October. Want to know a little more about me? Check out the interview “Meet James Pack, Writer and Artist.” You can find out what inspires me and what some of my favorite local places are. It was awesome to be interviewed and I look forward to having many more experiences like these. I hope you enjoy and keep a look out for my next book that’s coming soon. Stay spooky and Merry Kramp-mas!

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Free eBook Fridays: December

On our next installment of Free eBook Fridays, we have a short collection of short stories, “Dollar Tales From the Morbid Museum: Flash Fiction.” I self-published this collection on June 30, 2018 as an eBook. Today only, until midnight, the eBook is available for a free download. Once a month I offer one of my eBooks for free in the hopes that those who download it will read it and write a review on either Amazon or Goodreads. Reviews are not mandatory, but an honest review will help promote my works and are greatly appreciated. Get your free copy before the promotion ends. Download Here.

The purpose of the Dollar Tales collection is to build up the anticipation for the full paperback collection The Morbid Museum. I publish a couple of stories as an eBook for a dollar and get feedback on the stories. I also have a few stories published in online magazines which are included in the paperback edition. This process has helped me outline and figure out exactly how I want to present all these stories in one collection. Not simply a collection of stories with a similar theme but a story within a story. That’s why I created the idea of the Morbid Museum.

The Morbid Museum is curated by Siris Grim who holds a fascination with death; the prevailing theme of the Morbid Museum. He acts as a kind of narrator between the exhibits and each exhibit has a number of stories. This is a nice little preview of the overall collection. The full book is available in paperback and kindle. Enjoy your free copy.

Visitors to the Morbid Museum seek the dark and twisted corners of the world. They are both terrified and intrigued by the unknown. Tales of killers, monsters, and madmen are curated by the Master of Death, Mr. Siris Grim. Mr. Grim collects the darkness that everyone attempts to hide and displays it within the corridors of his gruesome gallery. Who will be next to purchase a ticket and walk the halls of the Morbid Museum?

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