up your summer reading with an intelligent and impressive dark thriller!
The
Book of Paul is a new dark thriller by author Richard Long. The book has
received great reviews and is currently on sale for 99 cents on Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble, and iTunes! Download
your copy now!
In addition, Richard is
doing a HUGE giveaway, including a $100 gift certificate to Amazon, signed
copies of his book, a Tarot Reading, and more!
Tweet, like, follow,
share, blog and grab a copy of his book to enter.
TheBook of Paul is the first of seven volumes in a sweeping
mythological narrative tracing the mystical connections between Hermes
Trismegistus in ancient Egypt, Sophia, the female counterpart of Christ, and
the Celtic druids of Clan Kelly.
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About The Book of Paul
“Never alive…and never
dead…”
In the rubble-strewn
wasteland of Alphabet City, a squalid tenement conceals a treasure “beyond all
imagining”—an immaculately preserved, fifth century codex. The sole repository
of ancient Hermetic lore, it contains the authentic alchemical rituals for
transforming thought into substance, transmuting matter at will…and attaining
eternal life.
When a lusty, East
Village tattoo artist has a torrid encounter with a battle-hardened loner, they
are overwhelmed by the intensity of their feelings. Rose and Martin soon
discover they are unwitting pawns on opposing sides of a battle that has shaped
the course of human history. At the center of the conflict is Paul, the
villainous overlord of an underground feudal society, who guards the book’s
occult secrets in preparation for the fulfillment of an apocalyptic prophecy.
The action is relentless
as Martin and Rose fight to escape Paul’s clutches and Martin’s destiny as the
chosen recipient of Paul’s sinister legacy. Science and magic, mythology
and technology converge in a monumental battle where the stakes couldn’t be
higher: control of the ultimate power in the universe—the Maelstrom.
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The reviews are in!
“Intelligent,
self-aware, and often amusing, while hitting all the markers for sadistic,
salacious, and scary. Written in short cinematic bursts from multiple
viewpoints, The Book of Paul…weaves in and out of the realm of alchemy,
mythology, and ancient arcana. No ordinary writer of horror…Richard Long is
doubtless going to build a large and loyal fan base composed of people just
like him: literate folks with a bizarre sense of humor who prefer salsa to
sugar, red meat to broccoli, and a bucket of blood to a bath filled with rose
petals. They will be waiting for the next installment.”
-- ForeWord Clarion
Reviews «««««
"Totally absorbing!
The Book of Paul is moving, profound, funny, terrifying and never lets you go.
The prose is swift and sharp...at times, even poetic. Masterful storytelling.
Hats off!!"
--Henry Bean,
writer/director of THE BELIEVER
“Elegantly written and
original, Richard Long's The Book of Paul…is so suspenseful and
entertaining that I could not it put down, reading late into the night,
wondering what the next chapter would bring. I strongly recommend it. The reader
will not be disappointed.”
-- James H. Cone author
of THE CROSS AND THE LYNCHING TREE
“I was greatly
impressed. It is extremely hard, if not impossible, to put down.”
--Michael Rips, Author
of PASQUALE’S NOSE
"Twisted,
outrageous, relentless -- you won't want to miss The Book of Paul."
--Greg Lichtenberg,
author of PLAYING CATCH WITH MY MOTHER
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About the author
He started
life in the school of hard knocks and worked to create his own rags to riches
story of troubled kid turned successful advertising executive.
His debut
novel, The Book of Paul, is a dark, thrilling, and psychologically rich
supernatural horror/thriller that blends mythology, science and mystery into a
page-turning addiction.
Richard is
also writing a YA novel, The Dream Palace, primarily so that his
children could read his books.
He lives in
Manhattan with his wife, two amazing children and their wicked black cat,
Merlin.
Connect
with Richard on the following links:
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An Excerpt from The
Book of Paul
Exercises
He practiced smiling.
Looking in the mirror,
Martin pulled up the corners of his mouth, trying to duplicate the expression
of the blond-haired man on the TV with the big forehead. Something wasn’t
right—the eyebrows? His eyes darted back and forth f rom the mirror to the
television, posing, making adjustments here and there…lips down, more
teeth…comparing…nope. After a few minutes, his face started to hurt and he gave
up.
He did push-ups instead.
Push-ups were easy. He did two hundred before he had to stop and change the
channel. A show called The Nanny had come on and he leapt up like a cat as soon
as he heard her whiny voice. He pressed the remote button with blinding
speed-click, click, click, click, click-until he found an old black-and-white
movie. Good. He liked those. He went back to his push-ups, his face tilted up
so he wouldn’t miss a thing.
In the movie there was a
woman who was worried that this man didn’t love her anymore. She didn’t know
it, but the man was worried that the woman didn’t love him either. They spent
all this time (he couldn’t even count how many push-ups) trying to make each
other jealous, hoping that would make the other one love them again. Martin
didn’t understand any of it. He looked at them laughing and smiling while they
tried to trick and embarrass each other, then went to the mirror and practiced
again.
It still didn’t look
right.
Pretty
Birds were chirping,
dogs were barking. It was a bright, bright beautiful
cool crisp day in the neighborhood. Junkies were up with their crackhead
cousins, prowling the lanes of Tompkins Square Park, looking for a not quite
empty vial to suck on or maybe a john so they could buy one. The gentry joggers
were up already, circling the park in huffy, puffy laps, their pounding
hoofbeats echoing the clang-whirl-shwoop-crunch of the mob- owned garbage
trucks.
Ho-hum. Rose slowly
fingered the ring on her nipple and wondered why she couldn’t get back to
sleep. The garbage trucks were the obvious reason. The booms and bangs down
below sounded like artillery fire. Still, she usually slept like a pile of
cannonballs at Gettysburg. When she went down, she stayed down. At least until
noon. She worked nights at the tat- too parlor, happily infecting all the
ink-crazed kids with HIV and hepatitis C (if they were lucky). She didn’t
realize she was doing that. She’d been following the sterilization techniques
handed down by her creepy boss. Unfortunately, they weren’t any more effective
than the jar of clear blue liquid that the barbershop used to sterilize combs.
In the time she’d been working, she had already been responsible for the
possibly fatal infection of eleven pierced and tattooed members of the “tribal
community.”
So Rose, blissfully
unaware of her crimes against humanity, lay wide awake at nine-fifteen in the
morning, twisting and turning her nipple ring. She wasn’t sure why she was
awake, but now that she was, she knew what she wanted to do about it. As she
rubbed the two silver rings that held her clit hostage, she wondered again why
she was up so early and why she felt so…horny? Hungry? What?
She knocked off a quick
O like she was popping a wine cork, light and charming but nothing special.
That’s when she realized it wasn’t a sex thing. So what was it?
She gripped the rings on both nipples and stretched them upward as far as she
could, dragging her small twin mounds along like a pair of stub- born mules.
She pulled and pulled until her nipples ached, then held the rings at the
Maximum Stretching Point, feeling the pain course through her, then settle back
down again. She didn’t back off even a millimeter, just took some deep slow
breaths for a moment or two and tried to pull them out even farther.
She thought of a dancer
doing hamstring stretches, and she figured the technique and level of pain must
be fairly equivalent. After slowly yanking them out again, she thought, I’m in
training, and started giggling so hard she had to let go. Thwack. Her tiny tits
and sore, swollen nipples bounced back against her chest like a pair of hard
rubber balls. Boing. Giggle. Ho- hum. Hmmm. So it wasn’t the sex and it wasn’t
the pain or the sexpain or the painsex. So what was it? She looked out the
window at the blue morn- ing sky and the green bushy trees and the squirrel
tightrope-walking on the fire escape and the cling-clang of the garbage truck
and…
She was happy. She was
unreasonably, deliriously happy! But why? The “why” brought a tiny frown to her
tiny face, but the “happy” was so much stronger that it brushed away the “why”
with a single gust of cool fresh air that came blowing through her curtains.
She threw the covers off
the bed and let the breeze wash over her until her skin was a textured roadmap
of goose bumps, pits, posts, rings and colored ink. She breathed and the ink
breathed with her. She sat on the edge of the bed and jingled like Donner and
Blitzen. She smiled and she looked out the window and knew something good was
coming her way.
Rose stood up and
stretched and took a deep breath and yawned and padded into the hallway where
her yoga mat was waiting. She spent the next half hour going through her
routine, a rare carryover of the training and discipline that dominated her
preadolescent life as a competitive gym- nast. She could do headstands and
handstands and down facing dogs like nobody’s business. In fact, it took some fairly
severe contortions for her to even break a sweat, but by the final lotus pose,
a slippery sheen of perspiration coated her arms and chest.
She sniffed her armpits,
bowed to the altar at the end of the hall and lit three candles. The candles
were nestled between a variety of crystals and minerals, some so brightly
colored she often wondered how something that vibrant and wondrous could
actually be growing like a plant on the walls of caves in total darkness. Or
like her amethyst geode, actually growing inside a rock, like an egg hatching a
million-year-old purple crystal baby. Her favorite gemstone was one her mom
gave her, a brilliant red crystal she called a bloodstone. Its smooth, squarish
surface was easily five inches across and three inches thick, one of the
largest of its kind, she’d been told. She rubbed it for good luck like she did
almost every day, then pranced into the bathroom for a very long, very hot
shower.
She hummed a happy song
while she soaped and scrubbed and rubbed and shaved and shaved and shaved. She
wasn’t sure what the song was or where she’d heard it before. After three more
humming choruses, it suddenly came to her and she could see Natalie Wood
dancing in that dress shop, looking in the mirror while the other girls scolded
her for being so silly. Rose looked in her defogging shower mirror, liked what
she saw and sang out right along with them, “I feel pretty…oh, so pretty…”
Monsters
You tell your children
not to be afraid. You tell them everything will be all right. You tell them Mommy and Daddy will always be there. You tell them
lies.
Paul looked out the filthy window and watched the little girl playing in the
filthier street below. Hopscotch. He didn’t think kids played hop- scotch
anymore. Not in this neighborhood. Hip-hopscotch, maybe.
“Hhmph! What do you
think about that?”
Paul watched the little
black girl toss her pebble or cigarette butt or whatever it was to square
number five, then expertly hop, hop, hop her way safely to the square and back.
She was dressed in a clean, fresh, red-ging- ham dress with matching red bows
in her neatly braided pigtails. She looked so fresh and clean and happy that he
wondered what she was doing on this shithole street.
The girl was playing all
by herself. Hop, hop, hop. Hop, hop, hop. She was completely absorbed in her
hopping and scotching and Paul was equally absorbed watching every skip and
shuffle. No one walked by and only a single taxi ruffled the otherworldly calm.
Paul leaned closer, his
keen ears straining to pick up the faint sound of her shiny leather shoes
scraping against the grimy concrete. He focused even more intently and heard
the even fainter lilt of her soft voice. Was she singing? He pressed his ear
against the glass and listened. Sure enough, she was singing. Paul smiled and
closed his eyes and let the sound pour into his ear like a rich, fragrant wine.
“One, two, buckle my
shoe. Three, four, shut the door…”
He listened with his
eyes closed. Her soft sweet voice rose higher and higher until…the singing
suddenly stopped. Paul’s eyes snapped open. The girl was gone. He craned his
neck quickly to the left and saw her being pulled roughly down the street. The
puller was a large, light-skinned black man, tugging on her hand/arm every two
seconds like he was dragging a dog by its leash. At first, he guessed that the
man was her father, a commodity as rare in this part of town as a
fresh-scrubbed girl playing hop- scotch. Then he wondered if he wasn’t her
father after all. Maybe he was one of those kinds of men, one of those monsters
that would take a sweet, pure thing to a dark, dirty place and…
And do whatever a
monster like that wanted to do.
Paul pressed his face
against the glass and caught a last fleeting glance of the big brown man and
the tiny red-checkered girl. He watched the way he yanked on her arm, how he
shook his finger, how he stooped down to slap her face and finally concluded
that he was indeed her one and only Daddy dear. Who else would dare to act that
way in public?
“Kids!” Paul huffed.
“The kids these days!”
He laughed loud enough
to rattle the windows. Then his face hard- ened by degrees as he pictured the
yanking daddy and the formally happy girl. Hmmm, maybe he was one of those
prowling monsters after all. Paul shuddered at the thought of what a man like that
would do. He imagined the scene unfolding step by step, grunting as the vision
became more and more precise. “Hhmph!” he snorted after a particularly gruesome
imagining. “What kind of a bug could get inside your brain and make you do a
thing like that?”
“Monsters! Monsters!” he
shouted, rambling back into the wasteland of his labyrinthine apartments,
twisting and turning through the maze of lightless hallways as if being led by
a seeing-eye dog. He walked and turned and walked some more, comforted as always
by the darkness. Finally, he came to a halt and pushed hard against a wall.
His hidden sanctuary
opened like Ali Baba’s cave, glowing with the treasures it contained. He
stepped inside and saw the figure resting (well, not exactly resting) between
the flickering candles. At the sound of his footsteps, the body on the altar
twitched frantically. Paul moved closer, rubbing a smooth fingertip across the
wet, trembling skin and raised it to his lips. It tasted like fear. He gazed
down at the man, his eyes moving slowly from his ashen face to the rusty nails
holding him so firmly in place.
The warm, dark blood
shining on the wooden altar made him think about the red-gingham bunny again.
“Monsters,” he said,
more softly this time, wishing he weren’t so busy. As much as he would enjoy
it, there simply wasn’t enough time to clean up this mess, prepare for his
guests and track her down. Well, not her, precisely. Her angry tugging dad. Not
that Paul had any trouble killing little girls, you understand. It just wasn’t
his thing. Given a choice, he would much rather kill her father.
And make her watch.
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