TITLE: Something Stirs
AUTHOR: Thomas Smith
PUBLICATION DATE: 6th October 2022
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About the book
While the house on Grant’s Ridge is under construction, a group of teenagers see the site as the perfect place to conduct a ritual to conjure an entity to do their bidding. Away from prying eyes, they are well into the ritual when a local law enforcement officer sees light coming from the construction site and goes up to investigate.
Forced to leave the ritual unfinished, they teens leave the house and manage to escape before the officer arrives. However, with the ritual incomplete, the entity is trapped in the wood, glass, and stone of the house and the only to complete its transference into our world is through more blood. A series of construction accidents begin the process, and with each accident, the entity grows stronger.
After the Chalmers family moves into the newly completed house, animal carcasses are discovered in the attic and the storage building. All drained of blood. And as the entity grows stronger, it begin to manipulate the house in order to get what it needs, including the use of the Chalmers’ daughter’s doll wielding a box cutter. And while the entity did not complete it’s transference into the world, a number of lesser entities sipped through and are making the lives of the teens involved in the ritual a living hell. Their sole purpose is to make the transference complete.
Ben Chalmers, his wife Rachel, their young daughter Stacey, Sheriff Elizabeth Cantrell, and pastor turned cabinetmaker Jim Perry are all that stand between the entity and it’s bloody transference into the world.
About you as the author
I have wanted to be a writer since I was eight years old. That was the year my teacher called my parents about my Christmas story about a drug addict who is killed in the gutter on Christmas Eve. When asked about my rather “odd” choice of festive holiday entertainment at the parent/teacher conference that afternoon, I said, “Not everybody has a Merry Christmas.” They thought about it, agreed I was right about that, and my story went up on the bulletin board with the rest.
Flash forward a lot of years, and I am now an award-winning writer, newspaper reporter, TV news producer, playwright, and essayist. My print and multi-media work has been published by Borderlands Press, Zondervan Group Publishing, Chronicle Books, Grinning Skull Press, Cemetery Dance, Pocket Books, Tor Books, Barnes and Noble Books, and Tales to Terrify. I have written jokes for Joan Rivers, and I am probably the only writer in captivity to be included in collections with Stephen King and the Rev. Rick Warren (author of the Purpose Driven Life) in the same week.
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Excerpt
“The house looked down on Pike’s Crossing like a headmaster observing a group of unruly schoolchildren. It stood silent, watching the town from the top of Grant’s Ridge through glittering leaded glass eyes.
Errant patches of moonlight played along the roofline, then disappeared. A weather vane, more for decoration than any real purpose, pointed west, then east. In the woods beyond the back yard, nocturnal creatures stirred, scavenging for food and scouting new scents carried on the night air.
A field mouse scurried across the clearing between the woods and the relative safety of the space beneath the deck, its dash for freedom cut short by a sharp-eyed owl. Talons lifted the dying rodent as lightning arced across the flannel sky.
The night groaned in the wake of the coming storm. Rumbles of thunder echoed and died away, replaced by more of the same. The house stood in dark relief against the darker sky, illuminated by sporadic celestial fire.
Hours earlier workmen had collected their tools, climbed into their vehicles, and sped away toward the coming weekend. Soon electricians would come to run the wiring, then the crew would be well on the way to wrapping up the project and handing the keys to the developer.
But for now, the house was content to hold its silent vigil over the town below.
And inside, something stirred.”
