by Andy Monk
The Strange Man called out from the corner of the room where he was sitting on a chair eating a pickled egg.
“Why are you dressed like a clown?” She asked, straining to look at him.
“Because I ran away from the circus of course,” Mr Wizzle chortled.
She let her head slump back down into the pillows and looked at the pretty lady next to her, “And what’s your name?”
“I’m Molly,” she said with a smile, before reaching over and giving her hand a little squeeze.
“That’s a pretty name; Kelly Johnson has a dog called Molly.”
“Really?”
“Uh-huh. Though Molly’s old now and she smells funny and pees on the carpet a lot.”
There was a sound that could have been either a laugh or a cough. There was another man she hadn’t noticed before, standing in the doorway, he was tall with short cropped hair. He had a hard kind of face, like a scary teacher, or maybe a policeman.
Molly half turned towards him though she didn’t say anything, but when she turned back she was smiling and her eyes were sparkling. She guessed Molly liked him a lot.
“Well, there’s no other similarities… that’s Amos, by the way, he’s… he’s my friend.”
She smiled at him and Amos gave a little nod, his shirt was half undone and she could she a vivid scar running across his chest.
“So,” Molly said, “what’s your name hun?”
“I’m Amelia… Amelia Prouloux.”
They all looked round at Mr Wizzle, who’d just dropped his bag of eggs on the floor…
Hawker’s Drift
Book Two
Dark Carnival
The Carnival has come to town...
“After the sun goes down the pleasures here are darker. A man takes his wifey and kiddies to the Day Carnival an keeps em entertained, but he’ll creep back here under the moon for his own pleasures... we got just about anything a heart might desire. A girl, a boy, a nip, a smoke, a sniff, a snort, a turned card, a rolled dice... However a man cares to burn his money, we got a fire stoked and ready for him…”
At the same time, on the same day, every year, the wagon’s of Thomas Rum’s travelling carney roll into Hawker’s Drift and the town celebrates the 4th of July.
But beyond the games and rides, the carousels and candy apple stalls, the bunco booths and fortune-tellers, the jugglers and clowns there is another show that only comes to life at night.
The sequel to The Burden of Souls takes the inhabitants of Hawker’s Drift on a dark ride as the Mayor continues to manipulate their souls for his own mysterious purposes. And as Amos the Gunslinger is drawn into the heart of the Dark Carnival he’ll glimpse the secrets behind the town of Hawker’s Drift as well as his own terrible demons.
By Andy Monk
In the Absence of Light
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The King of the Winter
A Bad Man’s Song
Ghosts in the Blood
The Love of Monsters
Hawker’s Drift
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The Burden of Souls
Dark Carnival
The Paths of the World (2016)
Other Fiction
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The House of Shells
The King of the Winter
After twenty years the road has brought Caleb Cade home.
Running from a broken heart and the hangman’s noose he followed it across Europe; searching for happiness in a pretty girl’s smile, the turn of a card and the depths of a brandy glass. Instead, he became a womaniser, and then a thief living behind a charmer’s mask until, finally, the road ensnared him in insanity and murder.
It is 1708, the Age of The Enlightenment, and, in the shadow of the nearly completed St Paul’s Cathedral, Caleb Cade has returned to London a broken man; incapable of love and terrified of the grave, his only friend the half imagined ghost of his brother.
The road has now brought him home for there is nowhere left to run, and his only hope of redemption is to find the man he might have been.
Haunted by his own ghosts and demons, he relives the events of his childhood that led to the death of the only friend he had ever known, and the fear that the King of the Winter is forever peering through the window, all cold of heart and sly of eye, waiting to take him down to damnation.
But whilst one journey ends and another begins. He is befriended by a fellow libertine, Louis Defane, a strange little man around which strange things seem to happen. A man with an insatiable appetite for all the pleasures of life, a man who can seemingly bend people’s will to his own, a man with sparkling blue January eyes and snow white hair.
A man who might not be a man at all…
Book One of the dark romance series In the Absence of Light; a story of love, loss, vampires and the dark hearts of men.
Book Two (A Bad Man’s Song), Book Three (Ghosts in the Blood) and Book Four (The Love of Monsters) are all available now.
The House of Shells
An illicit romantic getaway. A remote cottage. A deserted beach. A vanished lover. A house that can’t be escaped. A place that can’t possibly exist. A love that will cost everything.
The out-of-the-way and secluded House of Shells was the perfect location for a romantic break, particularly for a married man having an affair. Jack Orford’s beautiful young lover brought him to the little cottage by the sea so they could be alone for a few days, but after she disappears Jack finds the House of Shells is more remote than he could have possibly imagined.
Trapped, hunted and alone, all of Jack’s worlds are about to be turned upside down.
Further information about Andy Monk’s writing and future releases can be found at the following sites:
www.andymonkwordsandpictures.co.uk
www.facebook.com/andymonkbooks