Blog Archives
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.
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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…
Ghost Town
A. J. Thibault’s Ghost Town is a speculative thriller that combines time travel, espionage, paranormal horror, and the harsh mythology of the American West. The novel follows Richard Hart, a former intelligence operative and RAND analyst whose search for direction leads him into a covert military experiment near the abandoned town of Ehrenberg, Arizona. Transported from 1989 to 1891 alongside pilot Honey Burns and drifter Boon, Hart must navigate a community governed by appetite, suspicion, and violence. The book’s shifting chronology and alternating character histories gradually connect Hart’s private crisis to Moodbain, a legendary agent overseeing a technology capable of altering perception, matter, and time.
Hart gives the novel its emotional and intellectual center. His formidable analytical abilities are balanced by anger, loneliness, and a lingering fear that his achievements have amounted to little. Thibault’s extensive account of Hart’s impoverished Brooklyn childhood clarifies why he values intelligence so fiercely and why humiliation can provoke him into violence. His father’s lesson that “a real man has more than his brain and his fists. He has a heart” becomes a quiet standard against which Hart’s later decisions can be measured. Honey and Boon receive similarly revealing histories, allowing the novel to treat its three stranded travelers as psychologically burdened people rather than pieces in a time-travel puzzle.
The 1891 sections provide the book’s strongest atmosphere. Ehrenberg is crowded with saloons, card games, public punishments, sexual coercion, religious fervor, and eruptions of collective cruelty. As the experiment weakens the characters’ judgment and resistance, ordinary events acquire the instability of a nightmare. Thibault frequently moves between bleak comedy, grotesque spectacle, and genuine menace, creating a town that feels both historically tangible and mentally distorted. The novel’s breadth gives it considerable imaginative energy, though its many flashbacks, tonal shifts, and extended confrontations sometimes slow the central ordeal and require close attention from the reader.
The final explanation reframes the ghost town as both an experimental weapon and a moral test. Hart survives because he can think beyond the apparent limits of his situation, but his more consequential act comes later, when he destroys the information needed to reproduce the technology. That choice answers the question underlying his journey: whether intelligence serves power or conscience. “Time was the most valuable thing he had left,” the narrator observes, and the line captures the novel’s concern with mortality, agency, and responsibility. Ghost Town is an ambitious, densely plotted novel whose most memorable achievement is its fusion of a violent Western setting with a Cold War meditation on the dangers of controlling human perception and history.
Pages: 460 | ASIN : B088WSBPRM
Blood Echoes
Aaron Ryan’s Blood Echoes follows Tracie Vossler, an ex-Marine turned prison security guard, as she becomes entangled in the horrifying mystery surrounding identical twins Elias and Gabriel Brickert. Set largely inside Airway Heights Corrections Center and told through shifting timelines, the novel begins with a murder that should be impossible and then widens into something far stranger: occult rituals, demonic possession, body-swapping, institutional panic, and a mother’s desperate fight to protect her daughter, Lela. What starts as a prison thriller curdles into supernatural horror, with blood evidence, security footage, and human memory all becoming unreliable witnesses.
I was most compelled by the novel’s atmosphere. Ryan gives Airway Heights a clammy, pressurized quality; the prison never feels like a backdrop so much as a sealed lung trying to breathe around something rotten. Tracie’s voice is brash, bruised, funny in the wrong places, and sometimes jagged enough to cut through the melodrama. Her fixation on burgers, cigarettes, nail appointments, and her daughter’s teenage moods keeps the story tethered to ordinary life even as the plot begins to levitate into the occult. That grounding matters because without it, the supernatural machinery could have felt too gaudy; with it, the horror feels personal, almost domestic.
The book also has a maximalist streak. It piles on murders, rituals, possessions, confessions, betrayals, legal fallout, and emotional wreckage with very little interest in restraint. The momentum is hard to deny. Ryan writes like someone determined to shove every locked door open, and the result is messy in a way that often feels alive. I especially appreciated how the novel refuses to let Tracie remain a clean heroine. Her love for Lela is luminous, but her choices grow morally murky, and the ending leaves a residue of grief rather than the neat click of a solved case.
I think this would be a great book for readers who enjoy supernatural horror, prison thrillers, demonic possession stories, occult suspense, body-swap horror, and psychological thrillers. Fans of Stephen King’s The Green Mile may recognize the charged prison setting and the sense that something otherworldly has slipped into a place already built for suffering, though Ryan’s novel is more lurid, more frantic, and more openly demonic. Blood Echoes is a grim and feverish book about blood ties, borrowed bodies, and the terrible cost of surviving evil.
Pages: 332 | ASIN : B0GXN2TMD5
The Never Witch (A Thorne Witch Novel #1)
JP McLean’s The Never Witch opens with Adeline Thorne, a woman trying to live an ordinary life while being anything but ordinary. She’s the sister of a powerful witch, yet stripped of her own magic and burdened by a complicated past that’s steeped in betrayal, mystery, and supernatural politics. When an encounter with a dying warlock leaves her scarred, physically and otherwise, Adeline becomes caught in a dangerous web of secrets that threaten the fragile peace between witches and warlocks. The story twists between two worlds: the mortal calm of Vancouver and the hidden, charged realm of covens, spells, and old feuds. It’s part mystery, part fantasy, part family drama, and all heart.
The writing is clean and unpretentious, yet it hits hard where it counts. McLean paints vivid scenes with just the right amount of detail, never overdoing it. Her dialogue feels real, sometimes painfully so, and her characters carry their own bruises in ways that stick with you. Adeline is an intriguing character. She’s sarcastic, wounded, stubborn, and somehow still full of grace. I found myself rooting for her even when she tried to push everyone away. The pacing surprised me, too. It starts quietly, but by the second act, it’s hard to look up. Every chapter seems to add a new question or cut a little deeper into the old ones.
What really hooked me though was the emotion running underneath all the fantasy. Sure, there’s magic and danger and political scheming, but it’s the relationships that carry the story. The bond between Adeline and her sister, Sarah, felt honest, messy, protective, and full of old hurts that never quite healed. And then there’s Luke, whose own guilt and duty twist him into something both noble and tragic. The way their lives tangle together feels fated, like watching two storms collide. McLean doesn’t hand you easy answers. She lets you feel the tension, the fear, the hope, and the exhaustion that come with fighting battles you didn’t choose.
By the time I finished the book, I wasn’t just entertained, I was attached. The world McLean built feels layered and believable, and her characters have that rare spark that makes you wonder what they’re doing after the last page ends. The Never Witch is perfect for readers who like their fantasy grounded in emotion and their magic served with a side of grit. If you enjoy stories about found strength, sisterhood, and the kind of courage that comes from surviving what breaks you, this book will hit home.
Pages: 316 | ASIN : B0FCGK7MWV
Under the Guise of Religion
Woman in the Abbey follows a young woman fleeing her abusive father, who finds an abandoned abbey in a haunted forest, where she finds Lucifer, who is searching for love and redemption. What intrigues you about the horror and paranormal genres that led you to write this book?
I have always been interested in the gothic genre. I have read and reread the classics: The Castle of Otranto, The Monk, Melmoth the Wanderer, Dracula, etc. What intrigues me is the mystery and the elements of the supernatural. What I find most interesting as a writer is that the genre allows me to explore the psychological and sociological aspects of the story and its characters. Unlike horror, whose sole purpose is to frighten, gothic allows for a more in-depth exploration of the psyche.
What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?
The themes that I was interested in involved issues of faith and doubt, fidelity and betrayal, and, in the case of Sister Lucretia, cruelty under the guise of religion. We have seen this misapplication of doctrine by religious zealots throughout history, going back to the Inquisition. Lucretia is the embodiment of this. One of the other themes I was interested in exploring was that of violence against women. In this case, the violence was by a woman towards other women. This issue is prevalent in our society. It needs to be exposed and dealt with because, while we may not see it in our daily lives, it is there and there are many women who are suffering.
What is the next book that you are working on, and when can your fans expect it to be out?
I am currently working on a novel that involves my Italian heritage, but which, I hope, will speak to people of all ethnicities. It involves three generations, starting with the immigrants and ending with the grandchildren of those immigrants. I am hoping to explore what it means to be an immigrant — the difficulties they face from language to cultural differences; what is means to be the children of immigrants — those in-betweeners who have to navigate both the old ways of their parents and the new ones they face on a daily basis; and what it means to be third generation where the old ways are there still, way in the background but are mostly ignored. Much of this is based on my own experience as well as on my observations of our new immigrants and their children. The book is in its early beginnings and won’t be done for perhaps 2 or 3 years. I hope, though, that it will appeal to all ethnicities, not just Italian-Americans.
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A young woman, fleeing the clutches of an abusive father, stumbles upon an abandoned abbey on the edge of a haunted forest. But what she finds there is far worse than anything she left behind.
Within the crumbling walls of the Abbey of San Pietro, ancient horrors stir. A mysterious old woman holds secrets of the past, and an unearthly being watches from the shadows—a being with the power to raise the dead and a thirst for vengeance.
Driven by damnation and bitterness, he weaves a sinister plan, using the living and the dead as his pawns. But is it love or something far more dangerous that motivates him?
In this gothic tale of love, betrayal, and unholy retribution, nothing is what it seems. Will she escape the abbey… or become part of its eternal curse?
The Wickedness of Horror
In Murder Under Redwood Moon, a young woman’s peaceful existence in the mountains is disrupted by cryptic visions. paranormal activity, and a series of murders. Where did the idea for this novel come from?
First, I have always LOVED the witch theme. As a child, I loved the good witches – Glinda (Wizard of Oz), Mrs. Piggle Wiggle (my fav book) and Samantha Stevens from Bewitched. As a late teen and adult, I relished in the wickedness of horror and the evil witch. When I found the Suspiria (remake) and Eggers – The Witch a few years back, it brought my fascination with this genre present. Cannot forget Melisandre, though really, she falls into a category all her own! Nevertheless, with a background in Holistic Theology, it piqued my interest in studying Celtic Paganism, and I was pleasantly surprised to find quite a reverence for the culture/philosophy. That brought me full circle to the good witch aspect.
Second, I have long been fascinated by True Crime, specifically serial killers. For the true crime reader, there is a combination of Easter eggs within the book. I invite the wise ones to figure that out.
Finally, though I find evil characteristics intriguing, I am an optimist at heart. So, I wanted this spooky, scary sense to the book, but also wanted it light.
Quite a contraindication of thoughts, but, yes…that was my train of thought.
I find the world you created in this novel brimming with possibilities. Where did the inspiration for the setting come from, and how did it change as you were writing?
I lived in the Santa Cruz Mountains for about seven years, and in Santa Cruz County for a combined total of about thirty years. Just before the ease of the cell phone came out, my friends and I dreaded heading into the mountains lest our cars break down or run out of gas. Remember – I thrived on horror movies at that time as well – ha! So, there’s always been this spooky reverence as to what mystique existed amongst the trees. Like a wild animal – you admire it but wonder if it could break free and eat you.
Also, to begin the story, I just envisioned the beauty of the great horned owl amongst the redwoods – something I would see quite often – and the story bloomed, page by page.
What was your favorite character to write for and why?
I loved Auntie–her endearing quirk and ditzy-ness. And I loved the Sheriff–the dry reality that he inhabits, yet aware of the mystical. Arista is the upbeat person I wish I could have been at her age. Really, there is a bit of me in each of my characters. Even for the killer, my Editor helped me tap into my intolerant side. That, plus my awareness of the vileness of a serial killer and how they must view the world.
I feel that Murder Under Redwood Moon has all the makings of a first installment in a fascinating series. Do you have plans for a second book?
Murder Under Redwood Moon is Book 1 of the Murder, Tea & Crystals Trilogy. Book 2 – Moonset on Desert Sands – is under contract and in the final editing stage – to be released in March 2025. Book 3 is unnamed, yet almost complete.
Author Links: GoodReads | Website | Amazon
Now at the age of twenty-three, she has settled quite nicely into an eclectic lifestyle, much like her great aunt, and guardian since childhood, Bethie. She enjoys the use of herbs and crystals to help her commune with the energy and nature around her and finds pleasure in the company of her beloved pet, Royal. Usually quite satisfied with her mundane life high in the Santa Cruz Mountains, life becomes unsettling when a new recurring vision of an ominous tattoo as well as increased activity from the ghostly presence within her own cottage invade her once-harmonious existence.
But life in this mountain sanctuary takes an even darker turn when the body of Arista’s former classmate is found in the nearby river. As other young women fall prey to a suspected serial killer, Arista realizes that the terror is coming to her.
Murder Under Redwood Moon
Sherri L. Dodd’s novel Murder Under Redwood Moon transports readers to the rustic and mystical backdrop of the Santa Cruz mountains, where Arista Kelly’s seemingly serene life intertwines with the supernatural. Arista, a young woman who finds solace in Ayurvedic practices and with her Siamese cat, Royal, faces her past and emerging powers amid a series of chilling events. The narrative captivates readers with its blend of genres, harmoniously merging cozy mystery, young adult drama, and light horror elements, creating a tapestry reminiscent of the Twilight series and Jess Kidd’s Things in Jars.
Arista’s character, with her unique quirks and journey of self-discovery, forms an engaging focal point. Readers will find themselves rooting for her as she navigates complex emotions and untangles her mysterious past. The novel’s strength lies in its richly developed secondary characters, including a diligent sheriff, the enigmatic Great Aunt Bethie, and an array of suspects linked to an unnerving series of murders.
Dodd’s skillful fusion of nature reverence, supernatural themes, and suspenseful plot twists results in a narrative brimming with intrigue and a touch of witchy allure. The novel’s climax delivers a satisfying resolution yet leaves readers yearning for more adventures in Boulder Creek. Dodd hints at the potential for future tales in this intriguing setting, promising continued enchantment and mystery for her readers.
The novel’s strength lies not only in its vivid setting and multidimensional characters but also in its ability to stitch together disparate genres into a cohesive, engaging story. Readers, having journeyed through this enthralling mix of the mystical and the mysterious, may find themselves eagerly awaiting the next chapter in the captivating universe that Sherri L. Dodd has crafted.
Pages: 319 | ASIN : B0CTKPM863
People Are Complicated
Upon the Pale Isle of Gloam follows a girl who wakes up on a deserted shoreline with no memories and surrounded by supernatural beings. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
I have a deep appreciation for gothic fiction. One day the desire struck me to start on a story that would be somewhat of a love letter to the genre. To me, few things capture gothic storytelling better than horror. So, when I started writing Upon the Pale Isle of Gloam, I wanted to draw inspiration from the classic themes and elements we all love in gothic literature and horror. Things like existentialism and abandoned places, for example. A misty, supernatural island seemed like a great place to start.
What are some things that you find interesting about the human condition that you think make for great fiction?
That’s a great question. I think people are complicated, and though most are aware of that, there’s still this tendency to try and generalize others. Sometimes we’re quick to label them. Sometimes we oversimplify the complex problems they’re facing. We force black and white bottom lines onto gray areas. But no matter how much we do it, those complexities and gray areas are still there glaring back at us. Ignoring them doesn’t make them any less relevant.
Exploring parts of the human condition that are overlooked and shrugged off makes for interesting stories. At times it can be awkward. Sometimes ugly. But we can learn a lot from taking a moment to consider what others are going through. Maybe even learn more about ourselves—all while indulging in the escapism that stories deliver. Just look at the impact of a book like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
I felt that Upon the Pale Isle of Gloam delivers the drama so well that it flirts with the grimdark genre. Was it your intention to give the story a darker tone?
It was, absolutely. I tend to be drawn toward dark stories that make me feel something or walk away with a different perspective, even if it’s not one I’m comfortable with. When I chose to write a tale set within the gothic horror genre, I felt a darker tone would be crucial to delivering the kind of story I wanted to tell.
What is the next book that you are working on, and when can your fans expect it to be out?
I’m currently in the early stages of my next book, which will likely be more of a literary drama rather than horror. It’s hard to say when I’ll be finished with it, though I hope it won’t take me too long. In the meantime, I’d like to encourage readers of Upon the Pale Isle of Gloam to follow me on social media for updates. I’d love to hear from everyone.
Author Links: GoodReads | Twitter | Website
Upon a deserted shoreline, Rue wakes alone with no knowledge of her past. Decades of wreckage lay sprawled across the beach. The days are impossibly short, and the weather foreboding. Worse are the supernatural beings that stalk the landscape, littering it with corpses. Using only her instincts, Rue embarks on a journey to reclaim her truth and find a way home—all while unraveling the isle’s dark secret.
A spooky weekend read brimming with gothic themes and atmospheric horror.
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