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Daywalker: Hybrid Vampire
Daywalker: Hybrid Vampire by Len Handeland is a supernatural horror novel that blends vampire fiction, historical horror, queer romance, and paranormal adventure. The story begins in postwar Norway, where Anna Beck becomes involved with Wolfgang Von Pritzker, a former German officer hiding a deadly identity. Their son, Christian, is born a dhampir, half human and half vampire, with a thirst for blood and the rare ability to survive in daylight. By letting Anna, Christian, and Christian’s lover Kjell narrate different parts of the story, Handeland gives the novel the feel of a collection of intimate confessions.
Christian’s journey gives this vampire horror story its emotional center. Abandoned as an infant and adopted as a child, he grows up trying to understand his unusual body, control his bloodlust, and find a place where he belongs. Music becomes both an escape and a clever disguise when Christian fronts a vampire-themed rock band called The Vamps. The irony is fun: the audience sees a theatrical gimmick while Christian is quietly revealing his real nature onstage. His rise through the European rock scene also adds an unexpected show-business angle to the paranormal fiction.
The novel’s relationships are as important as its supernatural confrontations. Christian and Kjell’s romance develops from friendship and attraction into a loyal partnership, while Christian’s reunion with Anna forces both of them to face the pain of his abandonment. Wolfgang brings a colder energy to the family story, representing the predatory side of vampirism that Christian fears inheriting. These connections turn the book into more than a vampire hunter adventure. It’s also a dark family drama about identity, inherited violence, forgiveness, and the choices people make when love and survival pull them in different directions.
Handeland writes in a direct, dramatic style, with plenty of blood, sensuality, emotional declarations, and classic vampire lore. The later chapters move firmly into paranormal action as Christian discovers the full range of his powers and battles the vampires created by his father. Readers who enjoy LGBTQ+ horror, dhampir stories, gothic vampire fiction, supernatural romance, and fast-moving battles between vampires and vampire hunters will find plenty to dig into here. Daywalker: Hybrid Vampire is a bold, personal take on the genre, combining family secrets, rock-and-roll ambition, romance, and monster-hunting in one expansive story.
Pages: 223 | ASIN : B0GXMX8DM6
Emotional Journey
The Weapons We’re Born With is an epic fantasy about breaking free from inherited identities and forging one’s own destiny. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
I had written several books throughout my life that I shelved after not being quite satisfied with the final result, giving myself time to just work on my craft and my prose so that I could properly convey the stories I had in my head on the page. Coming into 2026, I felt my writing was much more polished and promised to give everything I had into actually taking a real shot at becoming an author.
I have played TTRPG’s for years and created a ton of nations and cultures for use in my games that laid the foundation for the world of Solara. I had done so much world-building over my years of DMing that I knew I could utilize a lot of that as inspiration for my novel setting.
My main inspiration for this story itself actually came from another TTRPG source, the Critical Role mini-series Calamity. I was so pulled in by the epic scale, powerful characters, and world-changing cataclysmic events that took place that I thought that could be an extremely cool take on Epic Fantasy, which historically features a more rags-to-riches type cast instead of characters. I wanted to explore the extreme pressure put on the “heroes” of each side of an epic conflict like that.
How do you think Shara, Marysa, Callum, and EM4022 each represent different aspects of identity and self-discovery?
I’ve always felt great characters will stand above great plots everytime so I approach my writing with a ton of the focus on the characters and their arcs. I wanted to craft distinct, interesting characters that dealt with true human emotions readers could relate to, so those emotional journeys are the first thing I truly hammered out and tried my best to make compelling. Theme for me often comes up naturally, and it’s something that you can highlight as it develops, and that’s what I did here, which helped to connect each character to each other with similar threads such as identity and self-discovery, as you mentioned. As I saw that appearing in each of their arcs, I leaned into it and tried to highlight it where possible to show that pretty much everyone can go through that type of journey while dealing with very different things, but internally and externally.
How did you balance the more intimate character moments with the larger-scale fantasy conflict?
I mentioned before, but I always think great characters are much more important than a great plot. I say that because I think a plot can come together more easily as long as the emotional stakes and character arcs are there beside it. I distinctly outlined what I believed to be a compelling and exciting plot, but once I had that mapped out, my focus shifted largely to the characters and their emotional arcs for much of the writing. If you have a character whom you feel emotionally attached to and want to succeed in their emotional journey, how will it not be exciting if they start engaging in epic battles? Whereas, if you have a character you don’t feel connected to, it doesn’t matter how epic the plot is – it will feel dull.
Can you give us a glimpse inside the second book in the Currents of War series? Where will it take readers?
The second book is well underway and will take place a year after the conclusion of The Weapons We’re Born With, as both sides of the conflict scramble to gain ground in the aftermath of Book 1. The world and cast will be expanded, as the story takes on a grander scale, which naturally occurs after many of the main characters ended in separate locations and with separate immediate goals.
Marysa navigates motherhood as she tries to escape an inescapable war. Callum struggles to maintain his cover with the Nightshades while secretly helping the Resistance. Ronin faces a new level to their choices as killing everyone associated with the Nightshades starts to feel wrong. Nikolai travels with a band of Ironborn as he tries to right the wrongs of his past and free their kind from enslavement.
Several new POVs enter the fold as well, including Kymus, Captain Mallory from the Grove, Jacinda the High Magus, and Aggie, who has been rising the Nightshade ranks.
A preview chapter for Book 2 is available at the end of The Weapons We’re Born With in all formats.
Author Links: GoodReads | Website | Amazon
Fifteen years ago, the Nightshade Empire launched a brutal campaign to eradicate all but a select few magic users, plunging the world into an all-consuming war. Now, the fate of all who draw on the Current hangs by a thread.
Marysa and Nikolai serve in the Sunburst Legion, the Resistance’s most elite strike force. They are among the only people capable of turning the tide—if their own secrets and doubts don’t destroy them first.
Darian Blackburn, general of the Nightshade Army, seeks more than just victory. He has a vision of a new world—and will sacrifice anything to see it through.
Meanwhile, three unlikely souls fight to survive the chaos: Shara, an orphan whose power to wield the Current makes her very existence a crime; Callum, a bitter outcast chasing revenge and riches; and EM4022, a killing machine realizing they may be more than just a weapon.
The Weapons We’re Born With is just the start of an epic dark fantasy saga chronicling the emotional aftermath of war on everyone from generals to orphans. Though the battlefield is sure to shape Solara’s future, the wars raging within can change its course just as easily…
A Survivor
Creatures of the Night follows an orphan fleeing captivity into the Yukon, where she finds a community of women and confronts human predators and a monstrous presence stalking them. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
I’ve wanted to write horror – and a werewolf horror in particular – since I’ve been writing. I was a little kid thinking about how scary werewolves are. But what scared me about them was not a big, menacing dog. I never really got into the stories about the person who has the werewolf curse. For me, I was always more sympathetic toward, or I was more scared for, whoever the other character was. I really loved The Werewolf of Fever Swamp. It scared me so much as a kid. That centralized the victims, not the predator, as werewolf stories tend to do. Talbot and such. We’re supposed to feel for them. And in the other movies, Jenny Agutter’s character, or Emily Perkins’ Brigitte, or Dee Wallace in The Howling, I was always so much more on their side or feeling for them because here was someone they loved and trusted who turned into an out-of-control beast and tried to kill them in their own homes. Of course, that is absolutely a very real and horrifying situation for many women and children out there in the world, especially women and children. So it had to be young women. And of course all kids go through puberty, but for women it’s this huge transition around them where they go from innocent, cute little doll to something to be preyed upon and sexualised, sometimes consciously but also unconsciously, and by members of their own family. The men and women in their own homes suddenly start treating them differently. All of a sudden the world is full of predators, and they are the prey. And it happens so young for them, you know, you listen to women talk about the first time a family member sexualised them, either by accident or deliberately, and it’s like, they’re kids. Children. I think that Little Red Riding Hood takes on a whole new meaning when you know that. The coat being red is a metaphor: the predator, the girl going out on her own. It’s such a vulnerable time.
So I had that. Little Red Riding Hood was the big one, but all of the stories that have used lycanthropy as a metaphor for adolescence. I am a huge fan of Angela Carter’s stories in The Bloody Chamber, and I love Ginger Snaps the movie, but I wanted to bring the concept back to the Red Riding Hood origins, where adolescence makes the girl a predator, which I think is a little unfair, and instead makes them vulnerable to society’s predators. And I needed a setting where all of that could come together, so to speak, with the men everywhere, and religion, and the authorities, all these patriarchal, male-dominated spheres. So a mining boom was perfect. And when I found Donald Trump’s connection to Klondike – his grandfather Frederick was a vile, sex-trafficking pimp and predator; that’s where the Trump fortune started – I had to, because who is the most prominent face of a predator of children today? Of course. Epstein’s number 1 fan and friend. Plus Yukon, Dawson City, it’s so remote, so cold, so isolated. I love Canada’s landscapes. I spend as much time as I can there, and I always feel like I’m going to be inspired by the surroundings. And I did follow the White Trail up to Dawson City, by car – I’m not crazy – and I couldn’t think of a better, or worse, situation to put these women in.
How did you approach writing Eliza’s transformation from the frightened Miss Laura into someone capable of defining her own identity?
As much as I love them and they are an inspiration, I’ve also always been a little offended by the metaphor of adolescence turning a girl into a monster. You see it a lot. Sometimes it’s done beautifully well, with great sensitivity, but I wanted to do the opposite. I wanted to have it, yes, make her vulnerable to predation, but also that feminine rage that comes upon so many girls in puberty; that’s a strength. That’s a defensive mechanism. And with everything I just described, how society just turns on so many girls, of course they lash out. Of course they scream and slam doors and go nuts. I wanted it to both make Eliza vulnerable but also be the defining difference that makes her a survivor and helps her stand up against the dangers.
The women in the novel have remarkably distinct voices and relationships; how did you develop them as individuals while maintaining the sense of a shared found family?
I worked in a women’s prison for three years as a teacher. I taught creative writing and various other literacy-based courses, and while I would never directly depict anyone’s personality with whom I met in there, there were certain dynamics among the women that were really inspiring. The depths of their character. It sounds silly, but women in prison are not only a cohort that are demonized, painted in very simple dimensions, but stupidly sexualised by predator filmmakers as well. But found families were everywhere in there. I saw women who hated each other come to one another’s aid if a vulnerable moment should have come upon them in the presence of the guards or something; the need to protect each other from predation – which the screws in that prison absolutely were – came before any other disputes between the women. It was amazing. Society never looks deep enough to see how amazing the dynamics are in a women’s prison. And who else gets treated like that? Sex workers. In horror especially, the genre has a lot to answer for; the sexual women always die horribly, and they’re never really explored. They don’t have origins or destinations. They’re just victim one, victim two, and the way they’re written, especially if you go back to slasher movies from say twenty to twenty-five years ago, there was almost a fetishised delight or voyeurism in watching these characters die.
So it was very important to get their individuality. I spent a lot of time on that. Who are these women, where do they want to be, where did they come from? I had a great cache of experiences to draw from since the prison.
Was the creature intended to represent the predatory behavior of the men in the story, or do you see it as having a different symbolic meaning?
It was a culmination of the predation by the men, yes, and the religious institutions, and the authorities. Once you open that door, you see it everywhere. Structural predation. Not just enabling predators, but maintaining the vulnerability of their prey. That’s why I had to have a culturally diverse cast. Because as bad as it could be in a Catholic orphanage, there were also residential schools, there were brothels run by Trump-esque men, there were police who used their authority and their positions to prevent people from protecting themselves while not protecting anyone as they should. And of course the fetishisation of Shuya’s culture. You see how a woman like Tigra could occur. I’m not asking for anyone to sympathise with Tigra, really, because she’s ultimately doing her share of awful things, but you can see how a person like that could be created by a world so fiercely predatory.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Amazon
They don’t know she is being followed. A beast out of mythology will stop at nothing to possess her forever. Or destroy her and everything she loves.
Creatures of the Night
Max Davine’s Creatures of the Night is a historical horror novel set against the brutal uncertainty of the Yukon in 1898. It follows a young orphan known as Miss Laura, who escapes the institution where she has been confined and eventually takes the name Eliza. Her search for freedom brings her into the company of Madam Tigra Volana and a group of women traveling north to establish a new life. What begins as a dangerous frontier journey gradually becomes a story of survival, found family, predatory power, and a creature that seems to follow them through the wilderness.
Eliza gives the novel its emotional center. She begins with almost no control over her identity, her body, or her future, and her understanding of the world has been shaped by fear and punishment. Her escape is described as a run “into distances immeasurable and unwalled,” which captures both the exhilaration and the danger of her new life. Freedom doesn’t immediately make her safe, but it gives her the chance to form attachments, make mistakes, and decide who she wants to trust. Davine handles her vulnerability with uncomfortable honesty, especially as her longing for affection leaves her open to manipulation.
The women surrounding Eliza are the book’s greatest strength. Tigra, Lila, Claudia, Jennifer, Vera, Drucilla, and Shuya have distinct voices, histories, tempers, and ways of caring for one another. Their conversations can be funny, abrasive, tender, or painful, sometimes within the same scene. They’re bound together by more than shared danger. They cook, argue, work, grieve, protect each other, and create a rough kind of home wherever they stop. As their numbers diminish, the empty spaces they leave become part of the story, and the final photograph of the group carries real emotional weight.
Davine’s Yukon is cold, hungry, crowded, and alive with menace. The wilderness is described in rich, physical detail, while settlements feel temporary and fragile, as though darkness could swallow them as soon as the lamps go out. The supernatural violence is graphic and relentless, but the human threats are just as important. Men use authority, money, romance, and social respectability as weapons, while the creature gives those patterns of predation a horrifying physical form. The later chapters build toward a fierce siege in which Tigra’s protectiveness and Eliza’s accumulated rage finally erupt.
Creatures of the Night is a grim, emotionally charged blend of frontier fiction, coming-of-age drama, and monster horror. Its prose is dense and intensely sensory, which gives the setting remarkable texture and makes the violent scenes hit hard. This is a book about women insisting that their lives be witnessed. Eliza’s final request that the photograph be placed “somewhere people will see it” quietly sums up the novel’s purpose. The story remembers women whom respectable history might reduce to labels or leave out entirely, giving them complicated lives, fierce bonds, and names worth keeping.
Pages: 300 | ASIN: 1764617509
Crescent City Requiem
Brian Kaufman’s Crescent City Requiem is a slow-burning psychological horror novel that blends private-eye fiction, blues history, New Orleans folklore, and supernatural dread. Francis Mallory, a hard-drinking investigator and amateur blues musician, accepts an unusual assignment: locate a supposedly haunted recording by Ike Zimmerman, the guitarist credited with helping Robert Johnson master his craft. The song, “Seven Moons,” is rumored to drive anyone who hears it toward suicide. What begins as a hunt through the secretive world of rare-record collectors gradually expands into a story about obsession, racial history, voodoo traditions, personal guilt, and the possibility that one piece of music can open a door that should remain closed.
Mallory gives the novel its bruised, uneasy center. He’s observant, intelligent, self-destructive, and often difficult to like, but his harshness is complicated by moments of generosity and genuine tenderness. His relationship with Grace, the sharp young woman who unexpectedly becomes his assistant, brings energy and warmth to the investigation. Their connection also becomes increasingly uncomfortable, tangled, and morally fraught, which fits a novel so concerned with the excuses people make for their worst choices. Kaufman doesn’t treat Mallory’s damage as a charming detective quirk. His drinking, violence, grief, and hunger for redemption shape nearly every decision he makes.
The strongest element is the atmosphere. New Orleans feels crowded, damp, musical, decaying, and fully inhabited. Record shops, bars, restaurants, cemeteries, alleys, street musicians, tourists, and local legends all feed into the book’s mounting sense of unease. The blues material is equally important, giving the mystery a convincing foundation and tying the supernatural threat to questions of exploitation, ownership, race, and cultural memory. The pace is deliberate, with plenty of conversations, historical detail, and philosophical reflection between the major turns. Some passages linger longer than necessary, and Mallory’s repeated thoughts about guilt and evil can become heavy, but that repetition also creates the feeling of a man circling an answer he’s afraid to face.
I’d recommend Crescent City Requiem to readers who enjoy character-driven horror, morally compromised investigators, Southern Gothic settings, and mysteries that unfold through mood and conversation as much as action. Blues fans and readers fascinated by rare records will find an extra layer to appreciate, while anyone drawn to ambiguous supernatural fiction should enjoy the way the book keeps psychological collapse and genuine haunting in tension. It’s a dark, patient novel that asks whether evil comes from spirits, systems, other people, or the choices we keep making after we know better.
Trust, Deception, and Survival
Ghost Town follows a former intelligence operative who finds himself involved in a covert military experiment near the abandoned town of Ehrenberg, Arizona. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
I began writing Ghost Town while finishing graduate film school at UCLA in the late 1970s. Influenced by Robert Ludlum, Jason Bourne-style espionage, and the Cold War, I imagined a dissatisfied intelligence operative confronting something far beyond his training in an isolated ghost town. Originally titled Desert Dreams, the novel evolved through many rewrites into a story that alternates between the present-day mystery and the events that shaped the protagonist’s (Richard Hart) life, revealing how his past prepared him for the impossible. Maybe I was cramming in too many concepts, but I was also intrigued by the military running a time experiment and how they could still be doing that in the present day to influence events. If they could change one thing in the past, could they do it again on a small, isolated scale?
The novel explores how fear, violence, and manipulation can distort people’s judgment. What interested you about examining human behavior under those conditions?
Setting the story during the Cold War, I was fascinated by how intelligent, well-trained people could make terrible decisions under pressure. Espionage isn’t just about gadgets and secret missions—it’s about trust, deception, and survival. I wanted to see how ordinary people would respond when the rules they depended on suddenly disappeared.
Which scenes proved especially difficult—or especially rewarding—to write?
The most rewarding scenes were those in the ghost town, where mystery gradually gave way to discovery. The most difficult part was balancing two stories at once—the unfolding present-day mystery and the protagonist’s past—so they complemented each other and steadily built toward the conclusion. The relationship between Hart, Honey, and Boon was a unique balancing act because each had a different view of what was happening in those three days. It was a challenge to mix the paranormal with a sense of horror in this “literary fusion” of high-tech contrasting with life over 100 years ago, where the disenchanted agent did not have access to any of the customary tools he would have at his disposal in the present time.
If readers leave the novel debating one question, what do you hope it will be?
I hope they might ask themselves, “What would I have done?” It is a story about survival and illusion and giving in to the illusion or sticking with reality and trying to understand what is really happening. Every character is forced to make difficult choices with incomplete information. If readers find themselves debating those decisions long after they finish the book, then I feel the story has succeeded.
Author Links: GoodReads | X (Twitter) | Facebook | Website | Amazon
Finalist, Eric Hoffer Book Awards
Brilliant but burned-out CIA operative Richard Hart has a midlife crisis. He wants out of the intelligence game for good…
A CIA operative. A black-site time experiment. A ghost town that shouldn’t exist.
Three strangers. Three days. Trapped 100 years in the past — and hunted by the dead.
🏆 Winner, American Fiction Awards Finalist, Eric Hoffer Book Awards
Burned-out CIA operative Richard Hart wants out of the intelligence game for good. But a career-ending rendezvous goes wrong, and he’s thrown into a military time-travel experiment gone catastrophically sideways — trapped in a desert ghost town, hunted by ghost riders and desperadoes, with no way home…
Essentials Vol. 2
Essentials, Volume Two picks up Harris Pax’s journey through a universe where reality has become unmoored from objective rules and increasingly responsive to consciousness, memory, and desire. Harris and Buttons travel between failing stations and self-contained worlds, trying to establish a safe zone before existence fragments beyond repair. Along the way, Harris confronts the people he couldn’t save, the family he neglected, and the suspicion that his heroic mission may be another expression of his need for control. Buttons’s presence gives the story warmth and momentum. She’s both his companion and an interdimensional consciousness living inside a borrowed body, which makes their growing intimacy inseparable from the knowledge that her physical life is temporary.
The book is especially interested in the difference between saving people and truly sharing a life with them. Harris can cross realities, solve impossible problems, and glimpse other minds, yet ordinary emotional openness remains difficult for him. That conflict becomes literal when he and Buttons enter a collective consciousness, a visually abstract space where thoughts form bodies and private fears become part of the landscape. Their connection offers Harris the complete understanding he’s always wanted, but it also asks whether intimacy requires surrendering individuality. The sequence is strange, tender, and unusually honest about the appeal of disappearing into another person. Their decision to return to separate lives carries real weight because they choose unfinished responsibility over permanent escape.
This volume reminded me of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman, particularly in the way each new realm has its own visual language and philosophical argument. One section becomes a whimsical airborne adventure starring a teenage captain and her robot companion. Another resembles an illustrated religious fable filled with angels, gods, and acts of creation. Later chapters dissolve conventional panels into typography, symbols, negative space, and overlapping voices. The changing artists make those transitions feel purposeful. Like Gaiman, Luke Arnold and Chris “Doc” Wyatt use fantasy worlds to externalize private conflicts, but Essentials brings a more openly science-fictional vocabulary to questions about grief, loneliness, identity, and belief. Even its playful realities are connected to the central question of whether an imagined world has meaning when it’s built only for its creator.
The conflict with Angel brings those ideas together especially well. Angel can create elaborate realities within realities, but Buttons challenges the value of a paradise that treats other lives as disposable or unreal. Their argument turns world-building into an ethical responsibility. The volume occasionally moves so quickly between genres and perspectives that some supporting stories feel compressed, yet that abundance is also part of its personality. Essentials, Volume Two is an emotionally ambitious graphic novel about people learning that connection involves risk, limits, and the willingness to return when escape would be easier. It expands the series’ cosmology while giving Harris a more personal reason to keep fighting, and its closing movement leaves the story poised between fragile hope and the danger of turning belief into certainty.
Pages: 184 | ISBN : 978-1964226217
Mad Dog Morgan
Mad Dog Morgan is a supernatural horror graphic novel that blends occult horror, haunted-house fiction, and the bruising spectacle of professional wrestling. Mitch “Mad Dog” Morgan is a washed-up wrestler carrying years of addiction, humiliation, and regret when he enters a house that feeds on wounded people. Watching from nearby is Hilda, a sharp, wheelchair-using young woman who can see the house and hear the souls trapped inside it. Their stories gradually converge, turning the book from a grim character study into a dark fantasy wrestling graphic novel with a surprisingly heartfelt partnership at its center.
Morgan is compelling because his physical strength exists alongside a deep belief that he’s already wasted his life. His history in the ring, his abusive childhood, and his dependence on alcohol all shape the choices he makes without reducing him to a collection of problems. Hilda brings a different kind of toughness. She’s observant, strategic, funny, and willing to confront Morgan when he starts slipping into self-pity. Their growing trust gives the supernatural violence emotional weight, especially as Morgan begins to recognize that the house’s monsters are people whose suffering has been twisted against them.
Maxi Dallo’s artwork gives the horror comics storytelling a filthy, restless energy. Heavy shadows and scratchy lines make rooms feel damp, unstable, and faintly alive, while Patricio Delpeche’s purples, greens, oranges, and violent reds push the imagery toward fever-dream territory. Wrestling moves are staged with satisfying force, but the most memorable sequences often involve warped bodies, staring eyes, living shadows, and layouts that fracture as Morgan’s sense of reality collapses. The house feels less like a setting and more like a patient predator, which suits the book’s mix of psychological horror and body horror.
Mad Dog Morgan is about what happens when pain becomes an identity, and what it takes to loosen its grip. It’s raw, profane, grotesque, and often funny, with tenderness arriving through practical acts of loyalty. Readers who enjoy supernatural horror graphic novels, dark fantasy comics, wrestling drama, and stories about damaged people choosing to help one another will find plenty to dig into here. The book hits hard, but its real strength comes from the empathy behind every blow.
Pages: 184 | ISBN : 978-1964226224
