Release date: October 5, 2018
Subgenre: Urban fantasy
About The Myth Seeker:
A banshee who just wants to sing.
A leprechaun with a gambling problem.
A sex-addicted succubus in recovery.
Vampires who want a sunny day at the beach.
And then there’s Steve, the regular joe who inadvertently brought
these flawed mythical beings to our world. But he has no idea how
he did it, which is a problem, because it’s his job to bring them
home.
All this responsibility is putting a serious damper on Steve’s
directionless lifestyle. Then he finds out a dark force is trying
to kill him and his friends. And he might be falling in love with
one of his charges…
Steve realizes he must get his act together, before it’s too
late…
Excerpt:
As Steve Remington gazed across the cemetery, his eyes landed on a
most peculiar sight: a pale girl in a white dress sat cross-legged
next to a headstone, playing her guitar for the dead.
Steve had his own funeral he should’ve been attending, but he
couldn’t take his eyes off the girl. He should’ve been listening to
his brother’s eulogy—he was speaking about their father, after all.
But his brother’s voice came out muffled and static-y, like an
old-timey TV program from the ‘50s. Besides the girl and her
guitar, everything around Steve drowned away.
Until someone smacked him upside the head.
“Jesus, Steve, stop staring off into space and listen to your
brother. He’s a fucking writer for Christ’s sake.” It was Steve’s
cousin, Lenny, who reprimanded him. Lenny quickly crossed himself,
as if he hoped God had misheard his blasphemous, profane
utterances.
“Eulogies aren’t really my genre,” Steve whispered back,
immediately feeling like a dick.
Lenny just shook his head. “Then do it for your father,
jackass.”
Steve wanted to say, “He wasn’t really my dad,” just to see Lenny’s
face erupt like a smoothie machine without the lid on. But he
didn’t want to sound too melodramatic—the day was already somber
enough—on the off chance that God actually was listening and
watching. He already had one embittered relative shaking his head
at him, he didn’t need the Holy Father to join in.
The truth was, Steve had been estranged from his brother for years,
so it was hard to listen to him.
But his sibling pressed on, delving into his reserves of eloquent
and elegant prose, calling forth all the wit and nuance learned
from his years of Creative Writing classes, harnessing his verbose
power into a single, perfectly lame speech. Steve thought he heard
the word “juxtapose” uttered at one point in time, which he was
pretty sure was illegal outside of Congress or a calculus seminar.
Then again, Steve didn’t really have a leg to stand on. He knew his
disdain for his brother’s speech came from within, a mantra
commonly proclaimed in his regular Alcoholics Anonymous meetings:
realize that someone who has a resentment toward you is actually
just angry at himself.
Steve was a proud-and-poor musician-turned-studio owner without a
single one-hit wonder to his name. The thing called the Internet
had really put a damper on his producing career in recent years,
since every Dick and Jane with an iPhone had the tools and
technology at their disposal to call themselves sound engineers,
music producers, or whatever other half-truth, half-assed title
they could come up with.
But what Steve did have an ear for was good music, and even from
this side of the graveyard, he could tell the girl in the white
dress had it.
With the opportunist inside him pushing its way to the forefront,
Steve couldn’t wait for the eulogy to derail or come to a smashing
conclusion.
“His commitment to his family was second to none. He had a passion
and zest for life unrivaled by anyone I know,” his brother
proclaimed.
Steve just shook his head. He wasn’t any of those things, Steve
thought. Except, maybe, passionate. Yes . . . he was a zesty
asshole.
When the eulogy finally ended, Steve was already halfway across the
green before his father’s casket had even begun lowering into the
earth........
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About Cory Barclay:
Cory Barclay lives in San Diego, California. He enjoys learning
about serial killers, people burning, mass executions, and hopes
the FBI doesn’t one day look through his Google search history.
When he’s not writing stories he’s probably playing guitar,
composing music, hanging with friends, or researching strange
things to write about.
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