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David Niall Wilson‘s Frugal Find Under Nine:

Deep Blue {$2.99}

Description:

Brandt is a down-and-out guitarist and vocalist who believes his life has hit rock bottom. He can barely make the rent on his apartment, he drinks so much he can barely make it to the crappy gig that keeps his band afloat, let alone play when he gets there. When he leaves the bar one dark night with a bottle of Jose Cuervo in one hand and his guitar case in the other, he finds he’s locked out of his apartment with no where to go. As he stands alone in the dark and feeling sorry for himself, he hears a lone harmonica being played in the distance. The sound is deep and powerful, and something in the music draws him away from his doorway and into an old alley where the homeless gather around garbage-can fires. In that alley, Brandt meets the harmonica player, Wally, an old black man who can play the music that Brandt dreams of – the blues. Not the blues as you hear them on the modern radio, but they way they were once played – filled with an extra “something” that can’t be taught. Despite Wally’s warning, Brandt begs the old man to teach him the songs he is playing, and in the ensuing encounter, Brandt is gifted – or cursed – with new abilities. He feels the pain building up around him and inside him. Not his own pain, but the pain of others, the pain of those who have passed away, the pain of those who died with no one to hear their stories. Wally explains it. The music will release the pain, and it is the only thing that will release the pain. Brandt must play, or the pain will build up inside until he destroys his own mind from the weight of it. He becomes a conduit for the pain of the world, and then he is left alone. Brandt plays one last concert with his band, and his performance draws them all, audience and musicians alike, into another world. They witness a panoram of pain and horror, and Brandt plays it up and out of himself, then walks away from the bar and the band, leaving them to wonder what just happened.

What follows are a series of revelations, one for each member of the band, and one for a young girl named Liz, drawing them together, and ultimately reuniting them with Brandt. Together, Brandt, Sinthia, Shaver, Dexter and Liz take off to the mountain town of Friendly California for a date with pain, destiny, and a silver haired Reverend who would like to see them dead.

In the final showdown, they must meet the challenge of the music, the pain, and their mingled histories and stand, or fall, with the pain of the world in the balance.

Accolade:

Publisher’s Weekly:

“In this engrossing, poetic novel of spiritual evil and the possibility of salvation from Wilson (This Is My Blood), a burned-out musician, Brandt, is playing in an obscure band when he hears a homeless black man, Wally, play the purest blues on the harmonica he has ever heard, music that encapsulates all the pain of the world. Brandt begs Wally to teach him how to play the same way. He disregards Wally’s warning that he would have to take the pain into himself, and then play to purge it lest it consume him. Brandt’s performance that evening changes the lives of his fellow band members. Together they discover that they can play not to wake the dead but to settle restlessly roaming spirits. Opposing them is a sinister figure masquerading as a man of God, who wishes the pain to go on and on. As Brandt and the other band members slowly and convincingly come to realize that a larger world surrounds them, Wilson demonstrates that a horror novel doesn’t need gallons of blood to succeed, that spiritual terror can be even more effective. FYI: Wilson is a past president of the Horror Writers Association and an ordained minister.”

Amazon Reader Reviews:

Deep Blue currently has a Amazon reader review rating of 5 stars. Read the reviews here!

An excerpt from Deep Blue:

From Chapter Two:

Synthia didn’t talk to angels, but she saw them.  She never mentioned them.  She didn’t watch them directly, only out of the corner of her eye, and only because they were always there.  It wasn’t like she had a choice.  They haunted the periphery of her vision, watched her world from the shadows, but they never watched her.  Synthia saw the angels, but they didn’t know she was alive.

When Syn had been ten, she’d tried to tell her mother.  She’d sat down at the kitchen table and asked to share the oddly-scented herb tea that filled her mother’s afternoons. She could still recall the heat of the cup as she wrapped her small hands around it, and the way the mint and herbs had sifted up through the mist to tickle her nose.

She’d felt very grown up that day, as if a page in her life had turned, or a cycle had shifted to the next ring.  Her mother had had very deep, brown eyes, and long hair teasing down over her shoulders.  Syn remembered the way the morning sunlight had filtered through the blinds, striping the refrigerator like a surreal, oblong zebra.  She remembered her mother’s odd little smile, the one that caused the shift.  The one that made them friends, in that moment, and not mother and daughter.  Deceptions were realities on all levels.  That smile had drawn her in, and Syn had spoken her heart.

She had told her mother then, about the old woman on the landing of the stairs, white hair wisping about her face and eyes wide in pain, or fear.  She told her mother about the two boys who mirrored her steps as she walked to school, books clutched tightly to her chest and eyes to the ground so that they would not catch her attention.  She told her mother about the girl in the shower at school, the one who was there, always, naked and cringing in the corner, and the shadowy, half-seen figure who hovered over her.  She even told her mother, for the first time, why it was that when they went to visit Grandmother’s grave, Syn had clutched so tightly to her leg.

Throughout that dialogue, Syn’s mother had not said a word.  She’d nodded, sipped her tea, and listened.  Silence is golden.  Right.  The liquid that had slid into the syringe had been golden.  The doctor’s eyes had been a deep, golden brown.  Her mother’s smile had been as sweet as golden honey.  Nothing.  Syn’s mother had believed nothing. She’d called a doctor, and Syn had told her story again.  The drugs had followed.  One drug, another, and another still, in quick succession, each chemical attack trying to drive out the demons.  Trying to drive out something that was just there, not illusion but frightening reality, made more frightening as the drugs robbed Synthia’s control.  There was no way to make them understand; only silence had helped.  The silence had stopped the drugs, but by then two years had passed.  Cynthia had passed to Synthia irrevocably, awakening as a junior in high school with barely passing marks and no friends with a future.  Through it all the angels had watched the world in silence, and she had watched them in turn, never speaking.

Now they were multiplying.  No matter where Syn turned, she saw them.  When she closed her eyes, she felt them.  When she slept, she dreamed dreams populated with their shadowy forms and empty eyes.  She didn’t even know why she called them angels.  They looked more like ghosts, but that wasn’t a place she felt comfortable.  Angels would never hurt her . . . ghosts might not care.  Ghosts might have laughed when Momma and the doctor brought the drugs.  The angels had paid no more attention to the drugs than anything else.

Since the night Brandt had left the band, the ghosts had slowly overrun her reality.  She knew it was foolish to dwell in the past.  She hadn’t spent enough time with Brandt when he was with them.  She had teased him, promised him, but she’d never let him get close.  Now he was gone, and that music—that last night.  How could she reconcile herself to the reality that was the band and the memory that was Brandt and feel anything but loss and regret?  How could she live her life walking through a mist of angels? Brandt had noticed her.  Without that notice, the weight of his eyes and the soft sound of his voice, the nothingness of the angels’ presence weighed on her like a shroud.

Syn rose, pulling the sheets up around her, automatically shielding herself from the prying eyes of those who didn’t even watch.  She blinked and shook her head to clear the cobwebs.  She needed to hurry and shower.  Shaver would call soon.  He called her like clockwork, every afternoon at four.  It gave her a minimum amount of minutes to shower, paint herself to perfection, and gather her wits.  It gave her a chance to push aside the visions and focus on herself, and her life.  Angels didn’t pay the bills, and though the band wasn’t breaking any records, since Brandt’s drunken ass had carried itself so dramatically down the road, they had been doing well enough to get by.  They might even break out of the bar circuit and cut a CD soon.  If Syn could keep it together.  If Shaver didn’t lose his heart.  If the new guy, the pseudo-Brandt they’d hired, Calvin, with his long, long hair and his long, long eyes, and his constant sniffing; no way to ignore the chemical base of that subconscious habit.  Calvin could play.  Calvin could sing.  Calvin was barely aware that he could do either.  He was helping the band in ways that Brandt never could have, but . . . he was no Brandt.

Synthia felt Brandt’s loss in ways she’d not been willing to admit possible.  He had always just been . . . there. Now there was the band, and her life, and the angels.  Nothing else.  Nothing that touched her on a deeper level than a mild sunburn.  Not that Brandt had ever seemed so important.  Synthia had spent more time cursing him than talking to him, and though she’d felt very comfortable in his presence, she’d not spent as much time there as she might have.  No reason to.  No reason to believe the opportunity would not present itself in its own time.

Now he had marched off down the road, right through the gathered ranks of angels who had actually watched him go, not ignoring him, as they did Synthia, as they had alwaysignored her.  Brandt had left her to watch his receding back, looking somehow more appealing in the tight, faded jeans than she’d remembered him.  And he’d left the memory of the music.  Brandt had always been good.  He’d always been just able to pull it off, no matter how drunk or out of it he might have been.

The music had meant more then, though it had taken the vacuum of Calvin and the “new” sound to drive that reality home.  Even through the thick white makeup, dead-clown pretty-boy attitude, and sneering lips that sugar-coated a frustrated heart, Syn had sensed Brandt’s talent.  Each time Syn had been ready to kick his ass out on the street and demand he be replaced by someone who would at least show up for practice, he’d pulled something out of his ass and tugged at her heart strings with it.

Synthia remembered the night she’d convinced him to take her out, to the carnival.  That night Syn had nearly told him about the angels.  Then the old witch lady had turned over that card, and Brandt had flipped out.  The moment, and the courage to speak, had slipped away.

Everything had been so right that night.  Syn had felt so close to him, so special to be with him, though she’d have never said so.  None of the others ever seemed to get it, but Brandt did.  During his rare lucid moments, he was the only voice she trusted to answer her in the same language she asked a question.  That night might have been the beginning of something special, but she’d seen that damned tent, and the past had intruded once more.  There had been a single old angel, kneeling by the door in prayer, or sorrow.  Brandt, of course, had seen nothing.  The old angel’s hands had scratched what seemed at first to be random lines in the dirt.  The random lines had formed a word.

“Remember.”

Synthia had read the word, turned from the angel, and her vision, and the only straight path had led through the doorway of the tent, toward the cards and destiny.  Synthia’s words, the whispered confidence she’d meant to share with Brandt, had slipped a notch back down her throat, and the night had done the rest.  Stolen moments were often taken back.  Rules of the road in the game of Life.  Brandt had staggered out of the tent, drunk, tripping, and he’d fallen.  Syn had followed, but the chemicals had robbed her of her strength, her ability to help him.  She had tried, God she had tried, but the act of trying had pumped her blood more swiftly and the drugs more powerfully, and they had nearly both ended up lying together in the dirt, staring at the huge Ferris wheel instead of just Brandt.  At what?  She’d never asked him what he’d seen.

They never watched her.  They never saw her.  She saw the angels, but they ignored her.  That was her pain.  Her mother had seen her, but never really seen anything.  Her father hadn’t seen her at all.  Boys, men, all had seen her body, her heat.  None had seen beyond it.  She had her own silent chorus of angels, mocking/accompanying her dirge-like song of life.

That was why Syn played the bass.  The deep, droning tones.  The vibration straight through to her soul and back again.  Even the angels wavered when she played.  When the deep intonations of rhythm and resonant power rippled through the air, it took on a deeper acuity.  The angels did not listen to her bass, but they felt it.  The universe was one giant chord, one universal vibration.  Syn longed to find her niche in that unity.  Her heart was a rebel . . . fighting her desire.  Her playing was dissonant, deep, wild and passionate, but it seldom blended.  Instead it forced the blend to her . . . forced her to become the eye of the storm, and every eye to seek her form.  The only time she could forget that the angels ignored her was when no one else did.

She’d never asked Brandt why he staggered out of that tent, or what he’d seen, stumbling into the midway.  She had stared into his eyes as he stared up at the Ferris wheel, far above them, and she’d seen . . . something, reflected in his eyes.  She couldn’t remember what, or who.

The phone’s ring ripped through the silence.  Syn gripped the blanket around herself more tightly, willing the world to silence.  Failing.

She rose, the blanket trailing away behind her, gripping the phone’s receiver tightly and drawing it to her ear, concentrating.

“Yeah?”

“Rise and shine, Princess.”  Shaver’s voice was edged with caffeine and fueled by that bright, inner fire that set him apart from every other being on the planet.  Lead notes rippled through the tones of his voice if you knew him.  The taut, corded muscles of his arms spoke of an inner fury, a driving need that only the guitar could sate, and then, apparently, poorly.  Shaver had been, if possible, even more intense since Brandt’s revelation and departure.  His leads were faster.  His eyes wider and more incomplete in the perfection of his motion.  A technical marvel with etched tears tattooed on cheeks of granite . . . muscles drawn so tight they could turn bullets aside.  The angels didn’t watch Shaver either.

“I’m up,” she said.  “I’ll be there.”

“Coffee is on me,” he said, and then the click/buzz/tone of the phone and silence again.  Somehow it was less perfect, less intimate.

Deep Blue is available for purchase at:

Amazon Kindle for $2.99

Connect with David Niall Wilson:

Website:  http://www.davidniallwilson.com
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/david.niall.wilson
Crossroad Press : http://www.crossroadpress.com