Archive for the ‘Literature’ Category

“The Unvanished Hitchhiker” appears in the collection SHADOWS OF THE HEART

In a twist on the Vanishing Hitchhiker urban legend, in which an unsuspecting driver picks up a hitchhiker and discovers the passenger is a ghost, a bereaved mother waits every Halloween night in anticipation of the knock on the door, bringing her lost daughter home yet again.

When mortal and immortal meet at the boundary of land and water:

As a boy, Adam had a sensual encounter with the elemental spirit of his family’s lake. Or did he dream it? Now, in middle age, he retreats to this refuge to reassess his life after a heart attack.

Shannon’s little boy Daniel has disturbing psychic powers. He talks to the wind—and it listens. All Shannon wants is a normal life. She wants to forget the cult of the Windwalker, a dark god from another dimension, and the terrifying night when her child was conceived.

But her first love, Nathan, son of the cult leader, contacts her for the first time since that horrific ceremony. He claims his father is stalking Shannon and Daniel.

Whose child is Daniel…Nathan’s or the Windwalker’s? Is her son fully human, or the spawn of a dark god from another realm? Are Daniel’s powers and Shannon’s surrealistic memories of the night of his conception fact or delusion? Nathan’s father plans to use Daniel to open a gate between dimensions and unleash chaos on the world. But Shannon wonders if Nathan is on her and Daniel’s side, or does his loyalty lay with his ruthless and demented father?

To save her child and become reconciled with her first love, Shannon fears she has no choice but to embrace the strange powers and paranormal realm she had rejected…