I’m pleased to announce that my debut novel, Welcome to Town, is now available for order on Amazon.com. Click the Amazon logo below to grab your copy of the ebook today.

This is the first book in the Town Chronicles series, and I’m so excited in your interest in the story and world-setting of Town.

To further peak your interest, below is the Prologue from Welcome to Town for you to enjoy. I hope it will peak your interest further to order your copy today!

Sample from the Prologue: An Unfortunate End

Deep within the Darken Oak, Darryl froze in the thick underbrush, feeling that pit in the stomach as his mortality met his ability to contemplate it. He was keen on not becoming a monster’s dinner tonight.

Darryl slowed his labored breathing, knowing that the sounder lurking nearby could detect the slightest movement. Seeking to flush out its prey, the creature bellowed a resonating howl that echoed through the woods, listening intently in the silence that fell in its wake. The monstrous roar was more whale-like than feline—though a sounder was related to neither. It used the sound to scare prey into moving, just as its sleek, black body streaked in iridescent violet was designed to give chase.

Darryl glanced at the compass strapped to his wrist, and then lifted his gaze to the north to gauge how far he was from Town.

Too far if the sounder finds me.

If it weren’t for the dense trees shrouding his view, he would have a grand vista of the small settlement nestled in the valley, with its bay to the east and mountains to its west, and all the buildings housing the thousand souls forced to call this place home.

A snapping branch to his left betrayed the sounder’s closeness, and Darryl held his breath fast. He’d studied them enough to know that they were normally nocturnal, camouflaged to hunt at night. But here in the perpetual gloom cast by the forest canopy, the sounders had found a new home among the diffused, cloying shadows; ones that likely matched its native habitat, encouraging them to stalk their prey at all hours.

With a low, almost sub-sonic growl, the sounder slinked into view. As dangerous as it was, Darryl had to admire the strange and beautiful creature. Sleek like a panther, with six muscled legs, a thick neck, and an oversized skull, the sounder was a predator unlike any Darryl would have ever seen back home. He’d determined that the oddly-shaped cranium contained cavities evolved to amplify its piercing bellow, which were then focused through the two curled, hollow horns opened at the end. These curving growths extended along the head, framing the domed, compound eye that itself stretched half the length of its toothy snout.

It swept its head athwart, scanning the brush, and then released another harmonic screech. Darryl nearly shuddered in both terror and awe.

It uses sound the way a dolphin does, to locate and flush out food.

He’d even once seen a sounder stun its prey with a bellow at close range.

The beast had poor vision though, unable to focus on Darryl as he stood stock-still. He knew how to avoid drawing the creature’s watchful eye with the motion it was primed to track.

But then something did.

A hundred yards off, a deer bolted from its camouflaging foliage, bursting down a narrow path in a desperate run. With almost gleeful chortles, the sounder gave chase, calling to its brethren that the chase was on.

With hunted and hunter headed northeast, Darryl decided to give them wide berth and make his way northwest. He’d learned that sounders worked in loose packs, so he kept a sharp eye for others. He’d also heard rumors that sounders could be soothed by music, or controlled through ultrasonic sound.

Probably native folklore and wishful thinking. But if it were true—man, that would be so groovy.

He wiped his brow on a flannel sleeve as he emerged from his hiding spot. Though the warm spring temperatures were a good 20 degrees cooler in the Darken Oak, surveying was still sweaty work—climbing trees to survey the land, collecting specimens, clearing ground cover, overturning mossy earth, not to mention hiding from predators. It would have been unbearable to many of those who clung to their comforts back among the paved, lit streets of Town.

Yeah, they’d rather ignore everything in these woods, repel anything south of their crumbling stone wall.

For Darryl, though, this was freedom. His psychedelic strawberry fields forever. Back in Town, he felt even more trapped than all of them already were. His job was a grind, and he needed this moonlighting gig, funded by those few who sought odd or rare specimens of flora and fauna. It was his escape, affording him the chance to work on his field guide while earning him some extra money on the side.

Darryl took a swig from his canteen, wishing the day had proven more fruitful. Nothing new for the field guide so far, though he’d made some further study of the curious behaviors adapted by the black squirrels that survived in this dense forest. In fact, the density of the Darken Oak’s majestic namesake also made it difficult to discern the hour without a watch. There were only small clearings among the small groves of maple, spruce, and pine trees to let the sunlight stream in.

It was in such a clearing, along the base of some pines where Darryl found something new. It was a fungus, with small fleshy folds that were deep brown, bordering on black. Though much darker, it was clearly related to the pale gills of the much larger mushroom-like growths on the side of some oaks that he’d dubbed listening trees. The speckled patterns before him bore an inverse similarity to their larger fungal cousins, though he imagined the diet was significantly different. While the listening tree fungus clung stoically to an old oak like giant ears—hence the name—the small spires of this fungus did something completely novel.

As a ray of sun pierced the forest canopy cloud, the mushroom’s cap opened like an umbrella seeking rain.

“Far out,” he breathed, watching the light ray pass and the fungus blossom contract again. “Photosensitive.”

He quickly confirmed this theory by shining his flashlight across the previously unidentified specimen, observing how the gills expanded from the stalk, only to collapse when he removed the light. He pulled out his field guide and started taking notes.

“Photosynthesizing fungus, turning light into nutrients without chlorophyll.” He quickly sketched its shape, noting its dimensions. “Groovy. The mottling patterns are similar to the listening trees, but yet so different from your big, meat-eating cousins, eh?”

In the distance, he could hear the triumphant wail of the sounder likely now feasting on deer and calling his friends for a dinner party.

“But what should I name you, little fungus?” There was a staggering variety of creatures living beyond the borders of Town, out among the endless expanses of woods, mountains and waters. And each fascinating species had been brought here from different habitats—across time and space—just like the residents of Town themselves. A menagerie in some misfit zoo, full of all manner of man and beast.

With so many creatures still undiscovered, the honor of naming this new fungus fell to him.

“Like Adam in the garden of Eden,” he quipped. “Except you only get to name whatever doesn’t eat you first.”

Darryl bent down close to the fungus, studying its gills. If it were truly related to the listening trees, then those two fungi had to come from the same original habitat before they were brought over. Then the question was when they were brought here. Was it about 20 years ago, when all the original residents—the Old-timers—arrived with Town as it crossed over? Before that? Or had they arrived later, a few at a time, as the Wanderers like Darryl had?

“What I wouldn’t give for a Clay-Adams dissecting kit,” he lamented, knowing that when Town had crossed over, it had been 1920 for them. And the technology here hadn’t advanced too much further in the 20 years since.

“Here I am,” he griped to the uncaring mushroom. “A man out of his time, so far from home, shipwrecked in this godforsaken place with no hope of rescue. And you know what the worst part of it is?”

The fungus said nothing.

“Exactly! No one’s with it here.” He pointed at the mushroom. “Nobody but me even cares about you!”

It was a stinging truth that so few shared his passion for biology, and even those patrons did so for profit, not science. Even though he’d never completed his degree before being yanked out of his time, he’d always been a scientist at heart.

Maybe I’m no Darwin or Mayr, but here I get to be a naturalist like Thoreau or Jack London—staring down the stark, brutal maw of Mother Nature.

He watched the ‘shroom open as another ray of light poked through.

“That’s it!,” he announced, brandishing his pencil over his field guide. “I’ll call you a lightshroom.” He wrote its new name with a flourish. “Now, I wonder if you’re a psychedelic or not?”

That sent him back to his hippie roots, recalling his life in the late 1960’s, and the choices that had led him here. He’d been torn. One option involved taking summer classes to graduate early and go on a field expedition. The alternative was a chance to be a Deadhead for the summer, following the Grateful Dead as they toured the country.

Torn in half at the waist was more like it. With Angela going to follow the Dead, though, what choice did I have?

And it had been a blast. Weeks of crazy, binge living: incense, sweet sounds and free love across the vast Midwest. Until that pit stop near the woods in Iowa, where he sought some privacy to relieve himself.

Damn shy kidneys!

Business done, he looked everywhere, but couldn’t find his friends. The road was gone, and it was as if the trees themselves had changed. Confusion had bred desperation, which eventually turned to dread. Then fear took root, telling him something was terribly wrong and could never be made right again.

He remembered wandering for hours—though it had seemed like days—before stumbling out of the Darken Oak to find himself in Town.

Yes, Town. Big T. That’s all they call it. And often said with the inflection of a thousand-yard stare mixed with the weight of the damned.

The Old-timers, who’d been calling it Town ever since crossing over with it 20 year ago, said that the name was simply a convenience. Since they couldn’t leave and there weren’t any other cities, they didn’t have to differentiate Town from any other place.

But the inflection, they said, came from the experience of living in a war-zone, wrestling with monsters both outside and within, knowing that they could never leave.

They keep telling me that after a while I’ll start saying Town that way too. Damned if I ever let that happen.

Darryl focused himself and confirmed with his watch what the angle of the light already told him. He had about an hour to finish his survey before the sun went down, and he knew better then to wander around at night. That was when they said the monsters of the Darken Oak, and from the other surrounding outskirts, felt more inclined to come into Town to hunt and scavenge.

From what Darryl had seen, he was inclined to believe them.

He packed up and pulled his flashlight out as he turned north to head back home.

Darryl started singing a song he’d never heard back on Earth, coming after he’d wandered into Town.

“Welcome to the Hotel California…”

His boss had been so pleased when he’d found a way to import that 45 record. It seemed like getting goods and materials into Town was very controlled and highly restricted, even through the black market. The technology was pre-1940s with a few very rare exceptions.

But with people, like Darryl, wandering in from all across recent history, Town had become a beautiful mélange of walking anachronisms—a collection of past, present, and future beliefs and ideas, hairstyles and fashions. All stuck together and surrounded by monsters.

Yup. Just like that line. You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.

Passing his light back and forth over the dense underbrush caused strange, fractured shadows to dance among the lower canopy. The sounds of the forest were transitioning from subdued late-afternoon rhythms to the increasing crescendo of the dusk chorus. The pungent scent of rotting wood caught his attention and he followed it to a fallen tree, the trunk clearly cracked under the weight of something large and heavy that had passed through long ago. He found mushrooms, but only the typical varieties and nothing worth stopping for.

Darryl cut through a dense copse of trees, hemmed by thickets. He could just make out where the trees thinned out in the distance and the long, rambling wall rose up as it ran along the southern flank of Town. Only eight feet or so at its highest, the barrier of mixed stones and cement had been erected long ago to try to contain the creatures of the Darken Oak. Some had claimed that it had failed miserably, while others credited it for saving lives. Regardless, now it was in poor shape, with gaps and holes here and there, which made it easy to come and go from the woods with ease.

And he knew not much further than the wall was the shack on the hill that Darryl called home.

Darryl turned his light back one last time, and stopped.

Lying motionless against the base of an old, moss-covered oak was a dried-up, pitch-colored blob, no bigger than a salad plate.

Darryl recognized it immediately and ran to it.

“A black brain?” he grinned in anticipation, shining his light onto its shriveled form.

He had little reliable information about it in his journal, all cobbled together from the fascinating stories and rumors he’d heard. He’d only seen one black brain before, and it had been crushed and pickled in a jar—enough to pique his interest, but useless for study. Unfortunately, this one here at the base of the tree wasn’t much better.

“Clearly a dead specimen,” Darryl fumbled with his light and pencil as he wrote in his journal. “The wrinkled skin is thin, visibly desiccated, and shrunken.” He wedged the flashlight among some leaves, balancing it to shine on the creature and the lower tree trunk. He pulled his measuring tape and jotted down its dimensions, “5.1 inches long, 2.8 inches wide, and somehow flattened.” Then he set about sketching its features in detail.

The tree trunk had a dark, oily trail leading up into the leaves. He’d learned that the black brain secreted some kind of viscous slime to help lubricate its movement, though others claimed it had other properties.

He began drawing the form, curious why this one was flatter than the other specimen he’d seen. Still, it had the same brain-like size, with convoluted folds tapering into the residual remains of a small bony spike, like a tail.

Wonder if this is how it attaches itself to its victim? Did this one die and fall off the tree? What killed it? Starvation? Old age?

Darryl knew that anything he could learn about a black brain could save lives if those stories he’d heard a few months ago were true.

Darryl hadn’t been looking for a black brain when he’d first heard of it, trolling for monster stories late at night at Grantham’s Billiard Hall. He’d joined the Old-timers and veteran Wanderers that evening as they shared tales over bootleg drinks. In particular, they spoke of the strange creatures they had outrun at night. Darryl treated those as glory day stories of stupidity fueled by alcohol, and not very reliable.

Then one of them, a factory worker named Adam Teedle, said he’d been almost killed by something called a black brain. The men leaning on the bar nodded in agreement, but Darryl had had enough of the tall tales.

“Bull,” Darryl called. “Just another tall tale, Adam. You don’t have any proof.”

“Proof?” Teedle puffed up, eyeing him to meet the dare. “I’ll show you proof.” He jumped over the wide, oak bar in a swift motion that belied the number of drinks Darryl had seen the man imbibe, and pointed at the assortment of dusty bottles and jars on the wall. Teedle took one particularly dark and cloudy one down and placed it purposefully on the bar. “There.” It was the crushed, pickled specimen. “That, my friend, is a black brain. And I’ll tell you how I killed it, if you’ll bring my a fifth of Pops’ Forgetting Tonic next time out.”

“Deal!” Darryl replied, pulling out his journal to capture the tale.

“You see, I was in Ol’ Doc Adams’ office that day when…”

“Wait a minute,” Frank McSorely held up his hand. He was a younger Old-timer who ran the lumber mill near Darryl’s little house on the hill. “It started way before that, with Jedediah.”

“When was this?” Darryl scribbled notes furiously as they talked.

“Town’s eighth year. Life was as calm and normal as anyone could ever hope for around here.” The others nodded silently. “So, Jedediah Winston had headed into the Darken Oak for some wood. The stubborn bastard was either too cheap to buy from me or too proud and had to do everything himself. No wonder he was always a loner.” Frank finished his shot and slammed his glass down on the bar. “Anyway, after one of his trips, Jedediah was acting strange—confused and sluggish—so we all told him to get to a doctor.”

“And he eventually did,” Dr. Baxter Van Tilsen chimed in. “And thankfully, not me.” Town’s preeminent doctor raised a glass and took a medicinal sip. “Nope, Jedediah Winston went to see Ol’ Doc Adams.”

Darryl was taking feverish notes. “Had the black brain made Winston sick or something?”

“Or something,” Dr. Van Tilsen chuckled with a sound like creaking gallows. “Somehow, the black brain was inside Jedediah, and then transferred to Doc Adams, who somehow continued seeing patients that day.” The doctor ran his finger along his chin. “Interestingly, the two women he saw claimed Ol’ Doc Adams was acting strange too, but of course neither of them said anything at the time. It wasn’t until…”

“Hey!” Teedle roused himself from a stupor, staring at the floating beastie in the jar. “This is my story. Don’t steal my thunder.”

“Were you one of the patients, Mr. Teedle?” Darryl asked, pencil poised above the page.

“Well, no. Not exactly.” Everyone looked at him like a man who let out the air on all the tires on the Town ambulance. “But I was the one who took Ben Wallace to the doctor after he hurt his hand at the Factory. Remember?” Darryl had heard legends about Ben Wallace, usually tales equal to that of John Henry of American folklore.

“So, what happened?” Darryl prompted.

“Yeah, Ol’ Doc Adams was acting weird, alright, kind of twitchy, like his mind wasn’t all there.” Teedle’s voice took on the air of ghost stories around campfires, and everyone seemed to draw closer to him. “He kept muttering to himself, something about being hungry. And the doc also had this weird snot oozing from his nose. It was dark, like blood, but too thick. I was afraid to leave Ben all alone with the doc.” Teedle stood taller. “Not when Adams was acting so weird. I just knew something was going on.”

“Oh?” Dr. Van Tilsen interrupted. “And it had nothing to do with you badgering the doc to prescribe you more morphine?”

“Hey, I hurt my hand too, trying to help Ben.” Teedle threw the good doctor a dirty look, but picked up the story thread once more. “Anyway, Ol’ Doc Adams grew more and more angry and unstable, until the doc actually jumped up on the table, screaming at me to help him hold Ben down so he could examine Ben’s neck—like anyone could ever hold that man down against his will.” Teedle picked up the black brain jar. “And this thing,” he lifted the jar on high, “this thing, started coming out of the back of the doc’s neck. Scared the life outta me!”

McSorely whispered to Darryl, “From what I heard from the people who cleaned up later, it scared more than life out of him.”

Teedle either didn’t hear, or ignored the comment. “So Ben and I pushed the Ol’ Doc…”

“From what I heard Ben did the pushing, Adam did the cowering,” McSorely said to Darryl.

“…And kicked this creature into the corner. That’s when I threw a bottle of rubbing alcohol at it.”

“He actually missed, but the thing got doused,” McSorely added.

“And I tossed a lit match onto it, setting it on fire.”

“Okay,” McSorely conceded, “That part he got right.”

“But the thing wouldn’t die, like it was immune to fire or something. It was covered in that black, oily stuff I’d seen leaking from doc’s nose and it kept sliding toward us—still on fire, mind you! And it kept making this ragged hissing sound—Heeeeeeesck!  Heeeeeeeeeesck! Then Ben grabs one of Ol’ Doc Adams’ scalpels. Remember Doc had that set of cool ones with black blades? Anyway, Ben throws the scalpel like an expert, stabbing it right between its lobes, killing it dead.”

“Turns out,” Dr. Van Tilsen sipped at his drink, “that the scalpel blade was made of obsidian.”

Darryl nodded. “You mean that volcanic rock, right?”

“The same, and wickedly sharp, a finer edge than stainless steel. Of course, to be fair, we don’t know if the obsidian killed it, or just stunned it.”

“Why not?”

“Because this knucklehead,” he pointed at Teedle, “went and crushed it with his shoe.”

“Can you blame me?” Teedle appealed to Darryl. “That’s why I also crushed the Doc’s head in too. Couldn’t have it spawnin’ any more of them things.” He seemed entirely too satisfied with this action for everyone’s comfort, and silence filled the room for a moment.

“Irony is,” Van Tilsen quipped, “that Ol’ Doc Adams had been near retirement when he wandered into Town, so he never got his chance. Until then.” He raised a glass, to which everyone responded in kind, expecting a toast. “To Dr. Benjamin Adams, may your soul retire in peace.”

“Here! Here!”

The doctor took a drink and grimaced. “Shame his replacement is such a quack.”

After another moment of awkward silence, Darryl had to ask the question that nagged him. “But why didn’t it attack the female patients?”

They all looked at each other, until McSorely fielded it. “Good question, especially since the next time, just last year, the black brain only went after females.”

“It attacked again?”

“Yup,” Frank frowned, “just last year during spring.” Darryl did the math and realized that this was shortly before he’d arrived.

“The black brain went through the whole McDermott family,” Frank said. “All three women—mother and two daughters. No one knew for sure how the oldest girl, Emily, had run into a black brain. We all figured she was sneaking into the Darken Oak to try and catch faeries or something, and instead came back with one of these black brains. Like the other victims, she returned home where the black brain got the others. Her father, Horace, came home that evening to find that the beast had worked its way through the mother, Edith, and had just taken their youngest daughter, Pamela, barely nine.”

Darryl felt nauseous picturing the situation. A few of the men each took turns trying to describe Horace confronting his dead daughter , somehow possessed by the black brain, standing over the body of his wife.

“He had to kill her,” someone said.

“He should have killed her,” Van Tilsen added.

“I would have killed her,” Teedle muttered.

Darryl had to know, pencil posed above the page. “What happened?”

“He couldn’t do it,” McSorely said. “”Horace knew that whatever had killed Emily and Edith was inside Pamela, somehow controlling her body. Yet he couldn’t bring himself to kill her.”

“And she—it—fled out of the house and into the Darken Oak.” Teedle echoed.

“We tracked it,” Dr. Van Tilsen added. “It was just after a late spring rain so the prints were easy to follow back among the trees, and it moved like it had a purpose.”

“Where did it lead?” Darryl asked.

“We lost the trail,” Teedle replied. “Not far into the Oak, the tracks just stopped. Gone among the thickets around that first dense patch of trees, gone like she done just disappeared.”

Darryl shuddered at the memory as he finished his sketch of the creature dead at the base of the tree.

Wonder why they never found the girl’s body.

He imagined the tracked ending at a tree as they had described, but she she couldn’t have just disappeared.

If it was late spring, the foliage could easily have concealed her…

“…if she had climbed up,” Darryl finished aloud.

He picked up his flashlight and began scanning the leaf-covered branches among this small, dense patch of trees. The pieces of the puzzle were starting to come together.

The black brain invades its host, and compels it to seek more victims of the same sex. Then it drives the host back into the woods. But why? To rest? To breed? If I could just find one alive…

Looking closer again at the flat, desiccated specimen it looked less like a dead black brain and more like the cast off outer skin of one.

Maybe it came here to molt. What if it’s not dead after all?

Searching the leaves again, the light seemed to arouse something up there. He heard a soft rustling among the branches and a sharp intake of breath betrayed Darryl’s mingling fear and excitement.

In the next tree over, his beam reflected off something shiny—a metal bracelet on a skeletal wrist caught in leaves and branches.

Pamela.

Crouching at the base of this tree’s gnarled base, he found a child’s skull and an assortment of bones picked clean by something with claws and teeth.

But the black brain has neither. What does it eat then?

There was a sudden movement above him. He shifted his light just in time to see the hissing black brain falling onto his head.  It clamped itself around Darryl’s head, blinding him as he flailed about. Before he could strike the creature, it plunged its sharp, bony tail spike deep into the base of Darryl’s skull, injecting something. His legs gave way, and any remaining fascination turned to raw terror as he collapsed, sprawling sideways on the ground paralyzed, unable to even scream.

Oh, God…

Darryl knew what was coming next.

The black brain squirmed into position, puncturing deeper with its tail spike, injecting something else, and then removing the spike completely. There was a sharp, blinding pain, but then it was gone as quickly as it had started. In its place, a strange euphoria overtook him, coupled with an out-of-body experience.

Darryl could now see himself, as if floating above the scene of his body lying on its side, the black brain poised over the bloody wound in the back of his head.

It uses its tail spike to carve a wound. No, an entry.

Feeling no more pain, he observed it all with a clinical detachment, still able to feel everything in exquisite detail.

Is this what dying feels like? It’s so surreal.

There was a nagging disbelief that this wasn’t really happening even as he witnessed it with his own eyes.

The black brain compressed itself to squeeze into the crimson hole it had made, slithering past Darryl’s upper vertebrae as it began eating his brain.

So that is what it eats. It’s making room for itself.

There was the stinging realization that it was somehow his own pride, his relentless thirst for knowledge that had lead him to this most unfortunate end.

He watched his body lose control of its autonomic functions, as the monster devoured his brainstem and hypothalamus, assuming control of his organs one by one.

Heart, lungs, larynx, stomach, liver, pancreas, intestines…

He sensed the loss of each to the black brain with every inch it burrowed in.

Darryl’s arm shot out, as it ate his cerebellum and took over his motor functions.

And that is how it controls the host’s body.

Then, the black brain continued feasting and began dining on his memories.

Grandma’s cinnamon raisin cookies. I can smell them… The touch of Angela’s skin, so soft…

As quickly as each memory was relived, it was eaten, absorbed, and gone.

Oh… God… I can feel it… digesting… my mind…

And he felt that pang of regret the dead must feel just before dying.

Then, even that last, dull twinge melted into the haze. There was nothing left of Darryl now. Nothing but one final, fading thought—a last deep-rooted and primal desire—to capture this one last experience, to complete this final journal entry before he passed it on.

I hope you enjoyed this sample. Please consider ordering your copy today!