THE NIGHTMARE WORLD TRILOGY
BOOK 1: THE NIGHTMARE MAN
As a young boy in Japan, Kenji is left home alone and plays Hitori Kakurenbo, a game of hide-and-seek with a demon, an Oni. His family comes home and the demon kills them all. A traumatized Kenji ends up in the foster system, with no memory of what happened that night. The doctors convince him he witnessed a human murder his family. Several years later he’s adopted by a US family. His adoptive father, Rob, also witnessed the demon when he was young, and still has nightmares about El Cuco, the boogeyman of Puerto Rico.
When local kids start going missing or turning up dead, their bodies violently torn apart and half-eaten, Rob begins investigating the cases. His nightmares return, and Ken begins having them, too. After seeing a psychiatrist about their nightmares, Rob’s premonitions start coming true and he fears he may be the murderer.
Is Rob the boogeyman or is Ken right and the Oni has returned?
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BOOK 2: THE NIGHTMARE PEOPLE
Forty years ago, rookie cop Bill Furman pursued suspected serial killer Arthur Blanke into the basement of Blanke’s house and witnessed something that has given him nightmare his entire life.
Blanke turning into a demon and disappearing from a locked room.
Now Furman is Chief of Police and gruesome murders are once again rocking the small town of Moonrise Cove in North Carolina. Children and their parents torn to pieces. Other children missing. The crimes are eerily familiar to the ones Arthur Blanke committed. But they also seem to have something to do with Allison Navarro’s family. Furman is aware Allison and her children survived an attack by a similar serial killer in Rocky Point, New York, twenty-five years ago. His suspicions about her family’s involvement grow stronger when Allison’s estranged son, Ken, is arrested at one of the murder scenes telling tales of a Japanese demon, the oni, being responsible.
Furman’s life is turned upside down when he and Ken come face to face with the demon and he learns that it’s been responsible for not just the deaths in Moonrise Cove and Rocky Point, but for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of deaths around the world. Because the oni is the Boogeyman of legend.
And it’s out to finish the game it started decades ago.
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BOOK 3: THE NIGHTMARE WORLD
Twenty-five years ago, Officer Robert Navarro vanished without a trace when he followed a bloodthirsty demon through a supernatural portal.
Now he’s back.
When former police chief Bill Furman shoots the Boogeyman in a child’s closet, he expects to find a body. Instead, the monster disappears and a man long believed dead steps out of the darkness with an impossible story. Robert has spent more than two decades trapped in a nightmare world, hunting the creature that stole his life and nearly destroyed his family. And he knows one thing for certain: The one Bill killed wasn’t the only one.
A second monster is loose in Moonrise Cove and it’s out for vengeance, leaving a trail of blood, terror, and mutilated bodies in its wake. As the town spirals into panic, Bill, Robert, and Robert’s son Ken must join forces with a rogue FBI agent protect the town and the people they love from an evil that can use any dark space as a doorway between worlds and turn any home into a slaughterhouse. But to stop the slaughter, they’ll have to do more than survive the night.
They’ll have to take the fight into the monsters’ world.
And once they cross over into the Nightmare World, they may never come back.
The minute I read about the Japanse game of Hitori Kakurenbo -- hide and seek with a demon! -- I knew I wanted to write a book about that. I struggled for months trying to come up with something, and in the end I had 3 very different, yet similar, stories. Someone plays the game, the demon is unleashed, mayhem follows. But there were distinct differences. One idea involved a child. Another a cop. In a third, a family was victimized by the demon. In the course of my research, I came across two facts: one, the demon is often considered the Japanese version of the boogeyman. And two, every culture has their own boogeyman legends.
At some point, I had the brilliant (ha!) idea to combine all three stories and incorporate multiple boogeymen: the cuco (Puerto Rican), the oni (Japanese), and the American version.
Then I put the whole thing on the back burner while I worked on other projects. But now and then I'd go back to those notes and read them. And, as so often happens, one day, probably 2 years after I first had the idea, something clicked and I knew how to piece all 3 stories together. But I also thought it would be fun to do them as a trilogy of novellas instead of a single novel, something I'd never done before. And thankfully, LVP Publications liked it enough to publish it.
