Today I’ll be hosting D.W. Gillespie on my blog in celebration of his novel, Still Dark. I personally read this book and fell in love with it immediately. That’s why I’m here to share this novel with you, and show the author support for this great story. I promise you’d be missing out not adding this to your to-read list!
Now for a few words by the author:
Creepy Roads, Take Me Home…
by D.W. Gillespie
With the release of my first novel, Still Dark, I’ve been thinking a lot about the different sources of inspiration over the years. I keep coming back to how important my environment has been in shaping my work. It’s not just the metaphorical environment, such as my family, friends, social status and all that. It’s the literal environment too.
Still Dark is set in and around Gatlinburg Tennessee, a few hours away from where I grew up. It’s a place that’s a ripe setting for horror stories. The mountains, the empty, quiet woods, the abandoned barns set in wide open fields. There are ghosts everywhere in those parts, whether you believe in ghosts or not.
I spent a lot of time at my grandparent’s farm when I was a kid. The road was, well into the 90’s, still gravel, and I can still remember the feel of it as a kid, under my shoes, under the tires as I nodded off to sleep. At night, the trees seemed to meet over the top of the road, making a roof that stars or moon couldn’t quite shine through. All you had was the headlights marking the road just in front of you, and beyond that, well, there could be anything.
My imagination would run wild at the moonlight rippling on top of a pond. Of the sounds of an owl, lonesome and terrifying. The kids would play around the yard at night, and that seemed to help, the sounds of our voices almost chasing back the darkness. But it was all just a trick of the mind. The dark was still there, and if you walked over to the barbed wire fence, you could hear things out in the woods, pawing and hooting.
Things sort of changed when the sun wasn’t around. Way out in the darkness, there were trees so wide that a dozen people couldn’t reach all the way around it. There was a family cemetery, some of the stones hundreds of years old. There were dead ponds so thick with algae that you couldn’t even see the water. During the day, in the light, these were all curiosities worthy of study and exploration, but at night… only a fool would venture out there at night.
Now, I’m a grown man, and I know woods aren’t all that different at night as they are during the day. That sort of thinking, it’s for kids, isn’t it? And yet… I can still remember that feeling, how small and helpless I felt alone in the dark. I see it on my own kid’s faces from time to time.
That’s my environment, the land that helped make me. That open country world that still holds secrets to this day. It’s all over my writing, but especially in Still Dark.
Still Dark
D.W. Gillespie
When a thunderous explosion rocks an idyllic cabin resort in the Great Smoky Mountains, animals and humans alike begin to act strange. Jim, along with his wife Laura and son, Sam, are cut off from the outside world, but they soon realize the true nightmare is just beginning…
Deep in the snow-covered woods, something is waiting. The creature calls itself Apex, and it’s a traveler. Reading the minds of those around it, Apex brings the terrifying fears hidden in the human psyche to life with a singular purpose: to kill any that stand in its way.
Locked in a fight for their lives, Jim and his family must uncover the truth behind Apex, and stop the creature from wreaking a horrifying fate upon the rest of the world!
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR — D.W. Gillespie has been writing dark fiction in one form or another since he was old enough to hold a pencil. He’s been featured in multiple horror anthologies, both in print and online. Still Dark is his debut novel, and his second book, a short collection titled Handmade Monsters, arrives in 2017. He lives in Tennessee with his wife and two children.
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#Horror #Paranormal #MindControl
Lee Andrew Forman 