Author of sci-fi/fantasy, horror and adventure/thriller fiction

THE CHILDREN OF RED PEAK Coming Soon

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COMING NOVEMBER 2020

“With this chilling story of cult abuse, DiLouie (Our War) proves his mastery of the slow slide from psychological drama into supernatural horror… An impressive twist…feels both shocking and inevitable. Horror readers will be hooked.” —Publisher’s Weekly

“I finished The Children of Red Peak several days ago and I’m still thinking about it—especially those terrific final 50 pages. Gripping, thought-provoking, and suspenseful, Craig DiLouie’s latest is a master study of darkness and light and the meaning of life.” —Richard Chizmar, New York Times bestselling author

“Absolutely riveting… A tapestry of past and present come together in this chilling tale of family, faith, and redemption. Craig DiLouie has a new fan.” —J.D. Barker, international bestselling author of She Has A Broken Thing Where Her Heart Should Be

“The Children of Red Peak is ice-in-your-heart, nerve-racking fantastic—Heaven’s Gate by way of Stephen King’s IT. Almost every page made my skin crawl.” —Peter Clines, New York Times bestselling author of Paradox Bound and Terminus

“The Children of Red Peak is both a subtle character study and a chilling tale of horror. It goes deep into the heart of people caught up in terrifying events. Highly recommended.” —Jonathan Maberry, New York Times bestselling author of Ink and V-Wars

“DiLouie really knows how to simultaneously shatter nerves and break hearts. The Children of Red Peak is a genuinely unsettling psychological horror novel, a story where faith and fear combine to destroy innocence and devastate lives. Intense, compulsive, thought-provoking, and highly recommended.” —David Moody, author of the Hater and Autumn series

“One of the most powerful voices in dark fiction does it again! Craig DiLouie’s The Children of Red Peak delivers a suspenseful and unpredictable psychological exploration of family, belief, and horror as chilling as it is thought-provoking. One of the best books of the year!” —James Chambers, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of On the Night Border

SURVIVOR’S SONG by Paul Tremblay

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SURVIVOR’S SONG by Paul Tremblay is a literary “zombie” novel with a lot of heart, not a little heartbreak, and a very high degree of realism such it all felt fairly real. I quite enjoyed it.

In the near future, Massachusetts is under quarantine as a new rabies-like disease ravages the animal and now the human population. Like rabies, it’s spread through saliva, but unlike rabies, it incubates in a very short time. When Dr. Ramola Sherman gets a call from Natalie, an old friend who is now eight months pregnant, she hears a frantic plea for help: Natalie has been bitten. Thus begins a journey across a crumbling state to save Natalie and her child before it’s too late.

What I liked: The first thing has to be the world building. I especially enjoy apocalyptic stories where we see the center give way and the rest falling apart. Tremblay’s quarantine zone is filled with panicking people who react in many ways, from denial (including the main characters, to an extent) to paranoia and aggression, along with infected animals and people who lurch and rave as they randomly attack. The police are still in action but overtaxed, vigilantes are taking matters into their own hands, and the hospitals are flooded and starting to break down. Everything rolls out fairly realistically, which made the world feel utterly real to me. The characterizations are for the most part very strong, even the minor characters, and I rooted for Natalie to make it however dimmed her prospects became. I particularly liked two teenagers who treat the apocalypse as something they’ve long awaited and trained for by watching zombie movies. When the story moves, the tension and action are realistic and satisfying.

I had some reservations, notably some long digressions that broke the pacing and tension for me, as well as finding Ramola to be not being nearly as strong a character as Natalie. Despite this, I enjoyed SURVIVOR’S SONG quite a bit, and after reading dozens of zombie novels, found it a standout in a genre to which I’d grown jaded, along with being a solid horror novel overall.

THE LIBRARY AT MOUNT CHAR by Scott Hawkins

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Scott Hawkins’s THE LIBRARY AT MOUNT CHAR is a surreal, compulsively readable, wildly inventive urban fantasy about a library whose ancient knowledge grants its owner virtually infinite power, and what happens after its godlike owner disappears. I loved it.

The story focuses on two main characters, Margaret, an orphan taken in with other children by Father to learn the mysteries of the Library, and Steve, an ordinary guy drawn into the intrigue to both solve the mystery of Father’s disappearance and possibly decide who will control the Library and become God.

The result reads a little like AMERICAN GODS, but while I personally found Gaiman’s gods kind of show-offy and grating, Father’s children–each specializing in a separate catalog granting them a single extreme power/knowledge base–come across as real people twisted by their horrific childhood spent training and by their powers themselves, resulting in a unique story with intense stakes encompassing all of reality.

In this remarkable debut, Hawkins gets almost everything right for me. The story constantly moves forward with great characters, believable yet fantastic situations, immersive lore, and mystery and conflict. While Carolyn is a fantastic protagonist and Steve is very likeable, the real star of the book is the mysterious Father and the Library itself, a vast trove of knowledge that grants its students unlimited power and is surrounded by titillating mythology.

On his website, Hawkins said he’d like to do a sequel but won’t until he comes up with the right idea to do it justice, which makes me respect him even more. Either way, I’ll be reading more of this author when his next work comes out.

ARMOR Audiobook Now Available!

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Available at Amazon, Audible, and iTunes, ARMOR: The Complete Series chronicles the journey of a tank crew through the Second World War, from North Africa to Berlin. Action-packed, authentic, and filled with flawed but tough men of the Greatest Generation, ARMOR drops you straight into the horror, brotherhood, and triumph of armored warfare. Enjoy the complete series as an audiobook available now–22 hours of entertainment–narrated by Garrett Michael Brown, who did an amazing job with the narration, characterizations, and a sprinkling of martial sound effects.

Listening to this book, you’ll fight alongside the crew as they go head-to-head with Tigers at Kasserine Pass, race to Palermo in Sicily, land during the horrific first assault wave at Omaha Beach, crash against the Norman hedgerows, make a stand against Hitler’s last blitzkrieg in the Battle of the Bulge, and batter their way into the heart of Nazi Germany. All the while, you’ll live with the crew in the cramped, noisy, and vulnerable fighting machine that was the American Sherman tank.

ARMOR: The Complete Series puts together for the first time all five episodes in my historical military fiction action & adventure series: The Battle of North Africa, The Fight for Sicily, Fortress Europe, The Bulge, and Reich’s Fall.

The eBook will launch June 26, and the omnibus paperback will launch around the end of the month. Thanks for reading!

Check it out here!

Cover Reveal for THE CHILDREN OF RED PEAK

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Today, horror blog Night Worms published the cover reveal for my cult horror novel THE CHILDREN OF RED PEAK, coming November 2020 from Hachette Book Group.

David Young, Deacon Price, and Beth Harris live with a dark secret. As children, they survived a religious group’s horrific last days at the isolated mountain Red Peak. Years later, the trauma of what they experienced never feels far behind.

When a fellow survivor commits suicide, they finally reunite and share their stories. Long-repressed memories surface, defying understanding and belief. Why did their families go down such a dark road? What really happened on that final night?

The answers lie buried at Red Peak. But truth has a price, and escaping a second time may demand the ultimate sacrifice.

Night Worms invited me to offer some comments about the cover. Here they are:

I worked with Lisa Marie Pompilio on the cover of Orbit’s OUR WAR, a novel about a modern civil war in America, and was absolutely blown away by the final product. When I heard I’d be working with her again on the upcoming release of THE CHILDREN OF RED PEAK, I was very excited. She didn’t disappoint. The cover portrays wilderness, which is on the nose in terms of where a fair portion of the novel takes place but also figurative of mystery, the past, and a spiritual journey from pain to truth. The upside-down world, dead trees, and trailing sliver of blood screams corruption, danger, and tragedy. What is hiding there? What is the price of finding out?

THE CHILDREN OF RED PEAK is about the human search for meaning and the dark side of finding it. In the novel, a group of adults reunite to confront the childhood years they spent in a religious community that degenerated into a violent cult. Tragedy broke them apart and will bring them back together to ask the questions: What really happened that last horrible night in the wilderness at the base of Red Peak? What waits for them on its summit? To find out, they will have to journey across a different kind of wilderness of time and trauma and return to make the same ultimate choice that faced their parents long ago.

Stay tuned!