Where Darkness Dwells

Science Fiction & Fantasy

By Glen Krisch

Publisher : Stray King Publishing

ABOUT Glen Krisch

Glen Krisch
I have written three novels: Where Darkness Dwells, The Nightmare Within, and Nothing Lasting. My short fiction has appeared in publications across three continents for the last decade. Dog Horn Publishing (U.K.) will publish my story collection debut in 2011. I am also a staff editor for  More...

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Description

During a hot summer night in 1934, tragedy strikes when two local boys search for the truth behind a local legend. They stumble upon the Underground, a network of uncharted caverns just below the surface of Coal Hollow. Time holds no sway in the Underground. People no longer age and their wounds heal as if by magic. By morning, one boy is murdered, while the other never returns home.

The Underground is hidden for a reason. Certain locals want to keep their lair secret, no matter the cost.

After learning a long-held family secret, Theodore Cooper is set adrift. Once well off and set in his ways, he is no longer sure of his role in society. He leaves his comfortable life in Chicago to tramp the countryside, searching for meaning in this new context. During his travels, he's drawn to an abandoned house in Coal Hollow and impulsively buys it.

Cooper doesn't know that a massacre had taken place in his new house. In 1851, a group of bounty hunters tracked a family of runaway slaves to the home. They wound up killing the homeowners as conspirators, then chased the runaways into a cellar tunnel leading to the Underground. The bounty hunters cornered the slaves and killed them. To everyone's astonishment, the slaves then rose from the dead. Over time, the bounty hunters chose to stay below ground, taking advantage of their new slave labor to build what they term "Paradise."

Their numbers are augmented by deathbed miners who are offered immorality in exchange for their subservience and labor.

Below a town struggling to survive both the Great Depression and the closing of the local coal mine, there lives an immortal society built on the backs of slavery and pervasive immorality.

"I was drawn in as the two young boys started off their adventure that went wrong and couldn't put the book down after that! I was captivated by how the story unfolded, mixing the history with the present and why things turned out as they did. The author's talent for telling stories is not only evident but great!"

 

"This book held my attention with the many twists and turns. The characters were well thought out and believable, and the storyline held the attention of the reader. I believe this could be a truly great horror movie. This author has a wonderful imagination and knows how to weave a compelling story. I would recommend this book to my friends."

 

"To say this is a zombie novel would be inaccurate - the monsters in this have more in common with the Irish Sidhe (with a touch of the vampire's weakness to sunlight), luring humans into their hollow hills with promises of eternal life. What makes the monsters in this effective, however, is their humanity, positive or negative (or both, depending on your definition of monster.) The themes of evil triumphing where good men do nothing is hammered home in the guise of several characters, and the theme of the revenant past and its corruptive bigotry, prejudice and barbarity of slavery."

"The tension builds as the reader is allowed glimpse after glimpse of the entire landscape and the enticement of evil brought about by the promise of eternal life."

 

"It's like wandering through a city shrouded in thick fog, in clinging mist. The shapes seem familiar, you almost recognize them for what they are, but when the mist clears briefly, you glimpse that it was not what you thought it was and see just enough to know that it was something else. These brief glimpses are like a puzzle you forget that you are working on. With each new piece that falls into place, the picture becomes clearer, but you still don't know what that picture is. You were given the pieces without having the box to use as a guide.  This would make a truly fearsome horror movie, and although it doesn't have a traditional happy ending, the way it does end is fitting."