Release date: June 10, 2018
Subgenre: YA Fantasy, LitRPG
About Pendulum Heroes:
Melvin Morrow has become a barbarian warrior maiden. Will he be able to escape this new, dangerous world and the chainmail bikini he foolishly chose as his armor or will he and his friends be stuck living their lives as their game avatars?
Melvin's a teenage boy not used to being ogled or the real world consequences of wearing a steel bikini. But the real world has shifted... him, his friends Jason and Rich, and his big brother Mike are stuck in character, in a place where danger doesn't lurk because it prefers to boldly stride out in the open.
Mages import game players like Melvin via the Rift
Pendulum. The reason: the work's suicidal and pendulum heroes are
insanely powerful. Usually. Melvin and his friends can be, too, if
they're in the right emotional state to trigger into character. Melvin's
a one-man, uh, one warrior maiden army when he's angry but anger's hard
to find with all that mortal danger striding around everywhere.
The road back home's at the end of a suicidal quest. Melvin better find something to rage about... because being genre-savvy only gets you so far.
Pendulum Heroes, James Beamon's debut novel, is an adrenaline fueled adventure for anyone who's spent a little too much time on the character creation screen instead of playing the game, those of us who have thought just how godmode we'd be with mage power, but mostly it's for all of us who have wondered who the heck installs a portal to another world in a wardrobe. Fans of Ernest Cline and Scott Meyer better be prepared to fall in love with a new series..
Excerpt:
Melvin Morrow
experienced panic for the first time because of a forest.
Alarm was Mr.
Burney dropping pop quizzes on his desk as if algebra problems had cred in the
streets while stress was finding Sophia Watkins standing behind him in the
lunch line. Alarm, stress, they weren't even on the same plate as panic, which
Melvin handled with virginal ineptitude. He felt near dizzy as his stomach rose
and his heart dropped while his blood surged with roller coaster speed. His
mouth, suddenly extra dry, tasted like salt.
The forest was
his living room. That's to say, Melvin was just in his living room. Now there
was no television, no coffee table, no game. There were no walls. It was all
gone, replaced in a blink with trees that towered above him, a dense and impenetrable
forest.
He had never
seen trees loom but apparently that's what trees do when you allow them to
congregate in groups of more than a dozen. Melvin wasn't that big into the
outdoors, considering Dad would make him cut the grass every Saturday no matter
how little it grew, but it wasn't like he was afraid of the outside. This,
however, was two extra servings of outside. These pine and cedar trees
stretched as far as the eye could see. Even with the sun shining brightly
overhead, he couldn't see very far into the shadowy depths of the forest, but
he was sure there were no stores on the other side, just trees and more trees.
Melvin looked down at himself, a “check to see if you're a ghost, are you still
alive?” kind of moment, which is when he discovered he was both quite substantial
and had women's breasts.
He couldn't
entertain the illusion that he was a dude that had somehow grown extremely
obese. The breasts were in a chain mail bikini top and outside of a leather
strap across his chest, chainmail bikini bottoms that matched the top and
calf-high brown leather boots, he wasn't wearing anything else.
His skin was two
shades darker than the russet potato color he had always known and there were
very few places for fat to hide. Everything he saw looking down screamed woman.
He, Melvin, was no longer a he. The
steel bikini glinted in the sunlight. His chest heaved in sync with his
panicked breathing, which only served to mortify him more.
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About James Beamon:
James Beamon is a science fiction and fantasy author whose short stories
have appeared in places such as Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine,
Apex, Lightspeed and Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show. He
spent twelve years in the Air Force, deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan,
and is in possession of the perfect buffalo wings recipe that he learned
from carnies. He lives in Virginia with his wife, son and attack cat.
Currently he's cutting back on the addictive habit of penning short
stories to focus on writing books. Pendulum Heroes is his debut novel.
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