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Reston Place: Are You Ever Too Old to Slay Vampires?
There’s something especially unsettling about a place built around comfort becoming a place where people feel unsafe. Reston Place uses that tension well. The novel follows Phil Persto, a seventy-eight-year-old widower and retired librarian who moves from Iowa to a Florida retirement community after losing his wife, Annie. His attempt to build a new daily life draws him into friendships, troubling questions, and a mystery with a supernatural edge. The setting does a lot of the work. Poolside conversations, shared meals, and walks through the grounds establish a recognizable social world, so the growing unease feels personal. You understand what these residents stand to lose because you’ve spent time watching them enjoy it.
Phil’s friendship with his neighbor Emmaline Howard gives the story much of its energy. Her background in law enforcement and his experience working with information make them an appealing investigative pair, and their conversations have an affectionate, teasing quality. Emmaline’s determination comes from caring about particular people, which gives the investigation a believable emotional drive. Lamar Eos, a gifted hacker whose enthusiasm extends to impressively large meals, adds a welcome streak of mischief. Their accumulated skills matter, and so do their aching backs, interrupted sleep, and worries about being dismissed because of their age. I liked how comfortably the book allows competence and vulnerability to share the same space. These characters can be frightened and still decide they have a responsibility to act.
This book reminded me of Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club. Both books find pleasure in watching older people use professional experience, social connections, and other people’s low expectations to investigate trouble close to home. Reston Place brings supernatural horror into that appealing setup, giving the everyday routines an increasingly uneasy atmosphere. Its attention to grief also gives the story emotional weight. Phil carries his love for Annie into his new surroundings, and the book treats companionship as something that can grow alongside that continuing attachment. Questions about care and the value of someone’s remaining time run through the mystery. In a community where residents regularly face loss, those questions have immediate meaning, and they give the danger a sharper personal significance.
The prose is straightforward, the chapters are short, and the humor makes the cast easy to spend time with. The pacing does get bogged down in repeated discussions of evidence and plans. Several conversations restate conclusions we’ve already followed, and some explanations of research or equipment could be shorter. I occasionally wanted the characters to move ahead while the tension was still fresh. Even so, the small domestic details often earn their space: remembering someone’s preferred toast or making room for a friend tells us how trust develops. That warmth is the book’s strongest quality. Reston Place will particularly suit readers who enjoy an ensemble mystery, a dose of horror, and characters whose curiosity and capacity for affection stay active well into retirement.
Pages: 220 | ASIN: B0H559ZRK2
A Sharp, Suspicious Mind
A Black Magic follows two women as they unravel a centuries-old legacy of violence, witchcraft, and supernatural forces rooted in one woman’s family bloodline. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
The whole trilogy began over cocktails, when my friend Fran told me she believed her dead mother’s spirit was still with her. A year later, she said she still felt the spirit but was no longer sure it was her mother. I had the entire series in my head about ten minutes after that.
The setup for this last book came from a problem I’d created for myself. By the end of A Blood Witch, Fran and Mary Jane have inherited three centuries of letters and diaries from the women who came before them, and not a single page explains how to be rid of Daedrian. The writers are long dead. The ghost hears every word spoken near him and cannot read, so two eighteen-year- olds sit in a Barnard library study room, passing a spiral notebook back and forth as they try to solve a murder in which every witness has been gone for two hundred years. I wanted to know what it would take for the last generation to finally read the whole archive, and what it would cost her. That question is the book.
Fran and Mary Jane have very different personalities and approaches to the supernatural. What inspired their dynamic?
Fran is the instrument, and Mary Jane is the scientist. Fran inherited the sight; Mary Jane inherited nothing but a sharp, suspicious mind and a cousin she refuses to lose. She can’t see the ghost. She has never seen anything. Everything she knows comes secondhand, through Fran, and her job is to decide what to believe.
I love that about her. In this book, she develops a filing system in the notebook’s margin: a dot for confirmed, a circle for probable, and a question mark for interesting-if-true, which she reserves for the seventeenth century and for most men. It starts as a joke against her own terror, and five months later it’s the closest thing the two of them have to a weapon.
They are, in a way, the two halves of how I write. One half wants to disappear into the story and live in it; the other half sits at the table with a pen, asking whether any of it holds up. Neither cousin could do this alone. Fran without Mary Jane would drown in what she sees, like the women before her. Mary Jane without Fran would have a very good hypothesis and nothing to test it.
How important was humor to you when writing their relationship and confronting such dark subject matter?
Essential. Horror only works if the reader is uncomfortable enough to keep turning pages, but not so uncomfortable that they put the book down. Humor is how I manage that dial. You read a novel alone. There’s no friend on the couch to laugh with, so the characters have to do it for you.
With the cousins, it’s never jokes for the sake of jokes. It’s how two people who have known each other since childhood talk when they’re frightened. Fran will pour her heart onto a page of the notebook, and Mary Jane will hand back three words and a row of exclamation points, then giggle because they’ve got one minute to get to the dinner table. That’s not a comedy beat. That’s what love looks like when you can’t say anything out loud.
I also come from a family where the women were funny, so that’s the register I hear. Aurora talks like Bette Davis; Liz talks like Blanche Devereaux. People who have survived something tend to be funny about it, and I wanted the girls to have inherited that, too.
If readers could take away one idea about inherited trauma, personal agency, or the ethics of power, what would you want it to be?
That any power you aren’t allowed to question isn’t protection, no matter how it feels from the inside. Daedrian hears everything. For three hundred years, the women in this family couldn’t speak about him, couldn’t ask what he was, couldn’t compare notes. He told each of them he loved her, and he meant it. The silence was the trap, and each generation passed it down along with the gift.
What finally breaks it isn’t a spell. It’s a girl who can’t see the ghost and refuses to stop asking questions, and another girl brave enough to go looking for answers in her own blood. Fran and Mary Jane don’t inherit a choice. They inherit an archive, and what they do with it is the only thing in the trilogy that’s truly theirs.
Author Links: GoodReads | Amazon
New York, 1974. Fran Tarantino and her cousin Mary Jane are freshmen at Barnard College, trying to build ordinary lives around classes, notebooks, and the bright promise of independence. But one day, Fran touches a drop of her blood to an ancestral heirloom and falls into the memories it holds, living another woman’s life in the space of a heartbeat.
She is searching for the one truth no living person can give her: how to break free of Daedrian, the self-proclaimed angel who has ruled the women of her bloodline for centuries and calls his dominion love.
Daedrian is always near, whether she can see him or not, listening at every door. To survive him, the cousins wage their rebellion in silence: passing notebooks across their study-room table by day, while Fran plays the role he expects at night to keep his impatience from turning violent. Each vision costs her more than the last, and the blood remembers truths he would kill to keep buried: what he truly is, and what it will take to end him.
In the chilling finale of The Haunted Women trilogy, A Black Magic braids three centuries of one family’s darkness into a single winter: a story of ancestral memory, patient courage, and the women who refuse to leave their dead unanswered.
This is Book 3 of a trilogy. For the full descent, begin with A Perfect Night (Book 1) and A Blood Witch (Book 2).
Content Warning: contains scenes of sexual violence and abuse.
Birth of the Vampire Pimp
Jason C.W. Baugh’s Birth of the Vampire Pimp brings Oakland street fiction into an adult dark fantasy adventure filled with vampires, witches, and dangerous ambitions. At its center is JB, a wealthy pimp whose encounter with Queen Sasha carries him into the strange world of Vol’kare. His street instincts become survival tools in a place governed by blood, magic, and competing interests. It’s a bold combination, and the book gets much of its personality from letting JB bring his language, attitude, and appetite for control into unfamiliar territory. The appeal starts with that collision between an Oakland hustler and a supernatural kingdom.
Vol’kare gives this vampire horror novel plenty to explore. Its three moons make nightfall and sunrise feel like practical concerns, while its forests, settlements, and imposing castle create a landscape that’s beautiful and threatening at the same time. Baugh fills it with distinctive creatures and unusual customs, giving JB’s travels a steady supply of surprises. The ravens are an especially effective recurring presence, adding an eerie sense of being watched. The fantasy world also has recognizable social divisions: wealth opens doors, authority invites abuse, and ordinary people struggle with the consequences. Those details give the setting concerns that extend beyond its monsters.
JB is charismatic, calculating, brutally violent, and capable of moments of generosity that complicate your response to him. His treatment of women can be troubling, and the narration often admires the same control that makes him disturbing. That tension is part of the reading experience. His encounters with people such as Summerly, a young artist, also make room for encouragement, vulnerability, and questions about personal freedom. For readers drawn to morally complicated protagonists in vampire fiction, there’s plenty to consider in the gap between JB’s view of himself and the behavior he displays.
The writing has a direct and talkative style, with slang, blunt humor, and long stretches of dialogue shaping its rhythm. JB’s voice stays rooted in Oakland even as the surroundings grow stranger, which helps hold the genre blend together. The action is frequent and graphic, and the sexual material is explicit, giving this supernatural adventure a distinctly adult tone. Its structure is episodic, with encounters building up the world as JB moves through it.
What stayed with me about Birth of the Vampire Pimp was the confidence of its central idea and the amount of imagination poured into Vol’kare. Baugh connects supernatural power with the kinds of influence JB already understands: persuasion, intimidation, loyalty, and money. That connection gives the story a recognizable thread through its many creatures and conflicts. Readers who enjoy adult dark fantasy, vampire horror, and the swagger of urban fiction will find a distinctive combination here. The book’s strongest qualities are its outspoken voice, its unsettling central character, and a world that keeps giving him new reasons to question who holds the power.
Pages: 356 | ASIN : B0H7YRWXP9
A Forgotten Cemetery
Blood Moon Over Betonville follows a gifted but troubled FBI profiler who investigates a boneyard of human remains in the town of his childhood, where an ancient curse, a mysterious beast, and buried family secrets threaten to destroy everything he thought he knew. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
When I was a boy, I took a bike ride on a trail through a forest behind my house and encountered an old, forgotten cemetery. Something about the place scared me beyond words and I pedaled home furiously without stopping. Though there wasn’t a strange creature there to greet me, I had a nightmare that night of a beast cresting the ridgeline behind the graveyard. The creature’s great form was black as the night sky before the setting sun; its howl rattled my soul, waking me from the dream.
I thought it would be interesting to couple those experiences together as a starting point for the story. Of course, in Blood Moon Over Betonville, we don’t know if the beast was real or imagined in the opening chapter but certainly it’s a metaphor for the protagonist’s tragic childhood and the torment he carries into adulthood.
How did you develop Tom Milner’s personality and his ability to understand the minds of killers, and how have the traumatic experiences of his childhood impacted his relationships and his approach to investigating crimes?
To a large degree, Tom’s personality is shaped by the events of his childhood. There’s a constant tension in his life. His drive to solve crimes and avenge his mother’s death takes an enormous toll. Losing his mother along with his father’s inability to rise to the challenge leave Tom with crippling feelings of abandonment, which makes it difficult for him to have close relationships. They can’t leave him if he leaves them first.
Though it’s been well-documented that many serial killers lack the capacity for empathy, often what turns them into monsters is experiencing an extremely traumatic childhood. Tom isn’t a sociopath, but his understanding of the mark left behind by tragedy and trauma at an impressionable age gives him a unique insight into their minds. He also has some other special gifts that defy rational explanation.
How did you develop Betonville’s history and its reputation for unusual occurrences?
Betonville was modeled after Coudersport, a small town in western Pennsylvania. For about a year, I lived there with my family when I was a child. The town was in a beautiful setting, surrounded by state and national forests. The people were very warm and welcoming. But it was also a place which had an undefinable, mysterious quality to it. It was where I had my cemetery scare and accompanying night terror. It was the same place that rained blood on walks to school (see Chapter One for more about that). And living in an antique home, where generations of lives had been lived, there was always a sense that you were never completely alone, especially in the house’s dark corners. So, I expanded on this feeling to create the town’s history and reputation.
What do you find most compelling about horror that combines physical danger with psychological and emotional conflict?
The threat of physical danger is a staple of modern-day horror, but for me, it’s the psychological and emotional conflict that makes stories compelling. We find him at the beginning nearly broken and in self-imposed isolation. A war rages for Tom’s psyche. Only when he completes his emotional journey, finding love and friendship and coming to terms with his true nature, can he be ready to face the demon. And whether he rises or falls, for the first time in his life, he won’t be alone.
Author Links: GoodReads | X | Facebook | Website
When a massive boneyard of human remains is discovered in the remote hills of western Pennsylvania, the town of Betonville, already known for unusual occurrences, is thrown into a panic. FBI Agent Tom Milner, assigned to the case, knows the town well.
He has many fond memories of his time there as a child. But that was before two life altering experiences changed everything—the night he saw the beast, howling from a clifftop under a blood-red moon, and, soon after, the murder of his mother during an attempted robbery. Over time, he questions whether the creature sighting was real, the conjuring of a child’s overactive imagination, or the product of a fractured psyche. Nevertheless, those two events, inextricably linked in his mind, plague his every waking moment and terrorize his dreams.
As Tom digs deeper into the boneyard investigation, each revelation more fantastic than the next, he comes to an unsettling realization: solving the case may unearth secrets about his own history that, perhaps, were better off left dead and buried.
Can We Look Directly at It, Just for a Second?
Rain Corbyn’s Can We Look Directly at It, Just for a Second? is a queer horror novella with an unusually personal view of the apocalypse. Its narrator retreats to the Catskills, convinced the world’s final day has arrived, carrying a lifetime of resentment, desire, shame, and unfinished business. Climate fiction and body horror meet in a landscape where the ocean has swallowed familiar boundaries and the natural world keeps finding strange ways to grow. There’s a wonderfully uncomfortable intimacy to the setup: planetary catastrophe shares space with awkward social encounters and private grievances. Corbyn makes that collision funny, ugly, and emotionally convincing. Even with the world collapsing, being a person remains an exhausting job.
The narrator’s voice gives the book much of its force. They’re caustic, horny, frightened, perceptive, and capable of turning almost any interaction into a prosecution of themselves or somebody else. You can laugh at a petty complaint and then recognize the hurt beneath it a sentence later. Corbyn is especially sharp about the ways therapeutic language, political righteousness, and online habits can shape relationships, including how the vocabulary of care becomes useful to people seeking control. The narrator participates in these habits, too, and their awareness of that keeps the satire interesting. Gender dysphoria, neurodivergence, and the wish to be desired are woven into the narration’s smallest decisions. Who’s looking? What do they see? How much explanation will make being seen feel safe?
As ecological horror, the novella gets under your skin through texture. Algae, insects, fungus, salt water, and damaged flesh make its world feel damp, hungry, and alarmingly alive. The body horror is graphic and sexually explicit, with disgust, attraction, and tenderness often occupying the same image. Corbyn’s comparisons come quickly, drawing on horror movies, internet slang, childhood memories, and ordinary consumer junk. That density can be tiring, particularly when several images compete for attention in a single passage. It also suits a narrator who compulsively translates experience into language, then worries about how that language will be received. The prose’s excess becomes part of the character’s struggle. Fans of weird fiction will find plenty to chew on in the book’s unstable relationship between human bodies and the ecosystems they inhabit.
I appreciated the book’s attention to the hunger for permission: permission to change, to want things, to feel anger, to stop performing goodness for an imagined audience. Its literary horror grows out of that hunger as much as it does from its grotesque imagery. Beneath the jokes and fury is a bruised longing for affection that doesn’t require a flawless explanation of the self. Corbyn keeps that longing complicated, giving the narrator enough vanity and spite to make their vulnerability feel earned. If you enjoy queer horror and experimental climate fiction with a fiercely opinionated voice, this novella offers a concentrated, demanding read. It’s at its best when a revolting image and a painfully familiar feeling arrive together, making you wince for two reasons at once.
Pages: 120 | ISBN : 9781590217900
Blood Moon Over Betonville
Bernard Doucette’s Blood Moon Over Betonville brings an FBI investigation into the territory of old curses, inherited grief, and a town with some very dangerous history. Its narrator, Tom Milner, is a gifted profiler whose ability to understand killers has made him professionally invaluable and personally isolated. When human remains turn up near the Pennsylvania town where he spent part of his childhood, the case pulls him back toward a terrifying encounter he’s spent decades trying to explain away. Doucette gives Betonville a convincing everyday life, with neighborhood diners, familiar storefronts, and mountains that invite exploration. Then he lets disturbing details seep into that comfort. Blood dripping from deer carcasses outside a hotel and an abandoned cemetery above a quarry make the place feel dangerous long before the investigation begins.
Tom’s voice gives the book much of its character. He’s observant, prickly, occasionally funny, and painfully aware of how often he gets in his own way. He can read another person’s motives with remarkable precision while struggling to accept kindness directed toward him. His drinking, his guilt over his mother’s murder, and his resentment toward his father shape both his work and his relationships. That makes his gradual willingness to trust people one of the book’s most satisfying developments. Ben Potter, his childhood friend and now the local sheriff, brings warmth through his loyalty and cheerfully mangled expressions. Fellow agent Hannah Renfroe earns her place through competence, humor, and the steady assurance that she’ll show up when things get difficult. Their company gives Tom something tangible to fight for.
The mystery develops through forensic reports, interviews, false leads, and patterns that become stranger as more victims are identified. There’s an unsettling cumulative effect to watching the usual investigative tools produce answers that make the larger picture harder to understand. Doucette uses that tension well: every discovery raises the stakes while tightening the connection between the town’s past and Tom’s own history. The folklore grows out of cruelty, concentrated power, and a desperate desire for justice, which gives the supernatural threat an emotional logic. Tom’s instinct to search for the person inside a killer becomes especially consequential here. Some explanations and reflections repeat points the reader has already absorbed, slowing the momentum in places, but the central questions remain compelling.
When the confrontation arrives, the book puts its earlier attention to firearms, martial arts, and physical vulnerability to work. The action is rough and urgent, and the characters’ loyalty matters as much as their preparation. What gives those scenes their force is the emotional groundwork beneath them: Tom has spent years treating his life as payment for a loss he couldn’t prevent, and facing the threat means confronting that belief too. The closing movement gives the story room to consider recovery, companionship, and the possibility of enjoying ordinary days again. That attention to life after terror makes Blood Moon Over Betonville a satisfying read for anyone who likes supernatural horror with an investigative backbone and a troubled, engaging narrator. Doucette makes the monster terrifying and the life beyond it worth fighting for.
Pages: 249 | ASIN : B0GMLCPFKK
Supernatural Protagonists
Rage of the Skinwalker follows a supernatural detective agency during World War II as its unlikely team investigates murder, espionage, racism, and a fascist conspiracy amid the history of the American Southwest. Where did the idea behind this novel come from?
Rage of the Skinwalker builds on the first three books of the Case File From the Nightfall Detective Agency, especially Trail of the Zombies, which delved into what happened to Native American Students at United States-sponsored boarding schools, and combines what is happening with current events involving people who have been detained in camps, even though many have lived here for years or decades, by drawing on what happened to Japanese Americans during World War II.
What did you want readers to experience in the opening chapters?
I want them to enjoy the adventure and mystery while gaining an appreciation of the history of what happened to these persecuted groups in that time period.
How did you approach creating a world in which supernatural beings coexist with historical figures and real events?
I wanted to create a world that would be plausible and believable where our supernatural protagonists are accepted and are agents of justice. Eleanor Roosevelt and Harry Truman were chosen because both figures, while by no means saints, are considered agents of tolerance and inclusion in history.
What was the greatest challenge of writing Rage of the Skinwalker?
Building on the last question, making a believable and exciting mystery-horror tale that does not strain reality, honors the history of the time, while hopefully sending a message to readers about what is going on around them in the present day.
Author Links: GoodReads | X (Twitter) | Facebook | Instagram | Website | Amazon
World War II has plunged the world into darkness. But while armies clash across continents, something evil is moving unseen through the chaos.
Vampire detective Tori Jacobsen and werewolf investigator Abraham Mueller are recruited for a classified government mission. They expect to hunt spies, saboteurs, and traitors. Instead, they uncover impossible murders and a conspiracy reaching far beyond the battlefield.
Every clue draws the Nightfall Detective Agency closer to a terrifying truth. An alliance of evil and greed is feeding on fear, hatred, and war itself, manipulating history from the shadows to forge a future where tyranny can never be defeated.
To stop it, Tori and Mueller must enlist old allies and unravel a mystery before the darkness consuming the world becomes permanent.
Because if evil wins this war…
Reality itself may never recover.
The first thrilling novel in an all-new Nightfall Detective Agency trilogy.
Perfect for fans of supernatural mysteries, historical horror, occult conspiracies, and high-stakes thrillers where the monsters fighting for humanity may be its last hope.
When Darkness falls, Nightfall answers.
The Fight to Save the World Begins Now!
Literary Titan Gold Book Award: Fiction
The Literary Titan Book Award honors books that exhibit exceptional storytelling and creativity. This award celebrates novelists who craft compelling narratives, create memorable characters, and weave stories that captivate readers. The recipients are writers who excel in their ability to blend imagination with literary skill, creating worlds that enchant and narratives that linger long after the final page is turned.
Award Recipients
Vanished Twin by Lawrence Hoffman
POINT FIRST by Nannette Potter
Visit the Literary Titan Book Awards page to see award information.
