Man, it feels like I’ve been waiting forever for today to come. My latest foray into cryptid monster madness, THE JERSEY DEVIL, is finally here, available EVERYWHERE. It’s going to be a week long full court press, with lots of fun along the way. Think of it like shark week, only with a killer creature birthed in the primordial Pine Barrens 200 years ago. If you plan to purchase the book on Amazon, please do so through my store or the links on this page.

First up will be an interview on the Horror Happens Radio Show with my main man, Jay Kay. This guy loves horror and is one of the biggest advocates for the genre. I’m scheduled to be on tonight at 7:30pm ET. We’ll be talking JD and other crazy stuff.

Wednesday is the big Facebook live event where I’ll be live and on camera answering your crazy questions and Lord knows what else I’ll get up to. Hellions who participate will be eiligible to win awesome new swag, free books and more! I’ll be giving the store away as we mosey along. I think we’ll need to come up with a drinking game. The party starts at 7pm ET and goes until I end up face down on the keyboard.

Aaaaand, here’s a sneak peek at the first chapter of THE JERSEY DEVIL. Hope you dig it, join the fun and let’s get our monster on!

Jane Moreland couldn’t believe how heavy Henry was, now that he was dead weight and starting to ripen. She should have done this last night, right when it happened, but she’d needed a clearer head. Polishing off the bottle of Knob Creek and passing out on the kitchen table hadn’t helped matters much.

            Well, no sense complaining. She’d been due a little me time.

            She woke up after noon, unsure what had transpired the night before until she saw him, lying there beside the sofa, neck all twisted to one side and his face blue as a Smurf.

            At least there isn’t blood all over the place, she’d thought. Just a little at the corner of his mouth. None on the carpet. One less thing she had to worry about.

There was no way she could get him in the truck during the day without anyone seeing. To kill time, she took a long, hot bath, washed and dried a load of laundry, drank three bottles of Coors that had been tucked away in the back of the fridge, watched a Jimmy Stewart movie on TMC and chain-smoked half a pack of coffin nails. The entire time, her eyes kept flicking to the clock then the window, waiting for the sun to check out. She found some old jeans and a .38 Special concert T-shirt, put on her scuffed cowboy boots and tied her blond hair in a high pony tail.

When it was half past six, she dragged an old throw rug from the garage, laid it next to her husband and turned him into it with a whole lot of grunting and sweat. She’d thought it would be as easy as rolling up a burrito. Back when she was in high school, she’d worked at a burrito joint owned by a pair of Chinese brothers with deep Southern accents. She’d never been able to reconcile the words coming out of those faces. It was a time before Chipotle, when a burrito was a mushy thing you got at a Mexican restaurant that tasted like crap. The job, and the place, didn’t last very long. In the two months she worked there, she became an expert at making burritos so fat, they were just about to bust out of their flour straitjackets.

            A dead Henry, she learned quickly, was a hell of a lot more to handle than shredded beef, beans and rice. Once she’d gotten the rug around him and cinched off the ends with duct tape, she sat propped up against his cocooned body and laughed, wondering how many burritos it would take to equal Henry’s total mass. Logic dictated that she should have been distressed at this point, perhaps freaked out or even, daresay, remorseful.

            “You didn’t earn my remorse,” she said to the rug-encased corpse, giving it a hard slap as she stood up.

            Good old boy Henry was a righteous bastard, a redneck from some pissant town in South Carolina who’d made his way to New Jersey via a construction job when he was in his twenties. They’d met at Dingo’s Bar when she was still two years from legal drinking age. At first, she’d been entranced, as young, dumb girls will, by his sweet Southern accent. She’d heard him order a Jack and Coke over the din of meatheads and was immediately drawn to the rugged cutie with long hair and five day stubble. He couldn’t have stood out more if he had worn an alien mask and bikini.

            They dated for six months, took a trip to Vegas and became a cliché. It took a whole year before the real Henry Moreland came out. He smacked her across the face in a drunken stupor one night because she didn’t hand him the TV remote fast enough.

            The rest is the same sad story that too many women confess to at shelters or police stations. After a while, Jane didn’t know who she hated more – Henry for being an abusive asshole or herself for not having the guts to run away.

            On nights she couldn’t sleep, she’d let her mind linger on all the different ways she could make him disappear. That was her happy place. Poison his dinner, cut the brake lines in his truck, loosen the top step going down to the basement, the possibilities were endless. Thinking about it always settled her down. But that’s all they were – private thoughts. Jane knew she was too chickenshit to actually do anything. Hell, she couldn’t even bring herself to jump in the car and just drive until she hit a border crossing, north or south. It didn’t matter.

            And then he came home last night, so drunk he could barely stand. He’d parked his pickup on the front lawn, stopping just a few feet from the house. Jane had been reading in her favorite lounge chair – the one with the little head cushion- on the ground level porch. It had been a nice night and even the bugs tapping against the overhead light didn’t bother her…much. If Henry had applied the brakes just a hair later, he would have killed her. 

This is a fine example of why you read to the end of a blog post. Starting September 1st, you can enter a contest on Night Owl Reviews to win a $25 Amazon gift card. Don’t say I never gave you anything!