Monday, January 29, 2018

Beyond Night by Eric S. Brown and Steven L. Shrewsbury

Release date: January 26, 2018
Subgenre: Dark fantasy, Horror

About Beyond Night:

 

An Epic Fantasy tale of action, adventure, heroism, horror and sorcery…

Beyond Night is a Dark Fantasy Horror novel that pulls back the veil of nearly two thousand years of jaded history. Come trod in the bloody footprints left by monsters, soldiers and wizards and behold what lies hidden Beyond Night itself.

It’s Bigfoot War mixed with Lovecraftian horror on the edge of the Roman Empire.

How could Rome lose a Legion? What could’ve happened to blot out the existence of over five thousand men not only from history but the Earth itself?

As the Legion moves north to engage the forces of Pictdom, a dark horror emerges from the bowels of the Earth. Thought to be random attacks by hulking monsters, Decurion August soon learns a dire truth, that these bloody events are directed by opposing the wizards of the Picts. While one side assembles all tribes in a confederated army to battle the Legion, the other pulls these Greyman beasts from the depths of the Earth.

August fights not only these creatures and workers of magicks, but internal passions in the Legion itself.

Can he discover a way to survive the enormous bloodletting about to take place that will only serve to satisfy the wizards of Pictdom?

 

Excerpt:

 

Blood across the stone slab, blood flying in the air, August saw nothing righteous in this place of worship.
Dismemberment didn’t evoke nightmares in August Arminius, Decurion of the Ninth Roman Legion. As a youth, he’d seen tribal leaders in his Germanic homeland chopped to pieces, either in clan warfare or by the encroaching Roman forces from afar. Once, in Iberia, he witnessed an attempt to pull a man apart using four horses, but that operation came off hitched when one animal failed to run at an equal speed to his kindred. Never, though, had August watched an arm being ripped loose from a living man. Sliced off with a sword at the mid-bicep or chopped crudely free with an axe, yes. The sight of one of his auxiliaries shoved against a standing slab in the stone circle, pinned at the waist by the huge foot of a monstrous shape and then having his sword arm torn out of the socket would stick in August’s mind for all time.
August found that he couldn’t blink, couldn’t move, nor even shout and alert the others in the scouting party near the border of Caledonia. Though the soldier being mutilated raised his shield in defense, a swiping blow by the figure in the murky time before twilight downed this action. August’s mind struggled to reconcile what his eyes told him: That a shape taller than any man, even a warrior from his native lands, bearing a halo-like outline of white haze, dominated the scout before him. Froiz was that scout’s name—or Flores as they called him back in his Spanish homeland that the Romans absorbed him from.
Just a kid, August thought as the young fighter struggled on and bled badly. Barely twenty years old. How does a twenty-year-old bleed well? 
The shape towering over young Froiz—a being from a nightmare, surely not a man—gave the auxiliary soldier a roundhouse shot to the face with the dismembered arm. That blow sent Froiz’s helmet flying and it bounced off a nearby stone pillar. August saw a host of birds, blacker than night, fly from this stone as the helm flew. As the cloud of birds separated, they revealed two human forms behind them in the woods. The dying cries of Froiz didn’t make these grim folk of the woods smile. August named them as Picts, having the skin and reddish black hair of a breed of savages that lurked by the thousands in Caledonia. One was a tall man, his hairline far receded, and a flowing white robe about his shoulders that seemed to mate up with his long ivory beard. Beside him stood a boy of just a shade over ten years of age, clad in a robe similar to the old man, but brown in color. They watched the further dying throes of Froiz as he staggered and fell over a vertically laid stone slab. The blood of the Iberian pooled for a moment just before Froiz fell off it. August thought he slipped, but soon noted the bearded man’s hand ran red in the moonlight, and that his touch had guided him to the earth. These two figures showed no fear at the sight of the hairy monster in the deep night.

 

Amazon | Goodreads

 

About Eric S. Brown:


Eric S Brown is the author of numerous book series including the Bigfoot War series, the Kaiju Apocalypse series (with Jason Cordova), the Crypto-Squad series (with Jason Brannon), the Homeworld series (with Tony Faville and Jason Cordova), the Jack Bunny Bam series, and the A Pack of Wolves series. Some of his stand alone books include War of the Worlds plus Blood Guts and Zombies, World War of the Dead, Last Stand in a Dead Land, Sasquatch Lake, Kaiju Armageddon, Megalodon, Megalodon Apocalypse, Kraken, Alien Battalion, The Last Fleet, and From the Snow They Came to name only a few. His short fiction has been published hundreds of times in the small press in beyond including markets like the Onward Drake and Black Tide Rising anthologies from Baen Books, the Grantville Gazette, the SNAFU Military horror anthology series, and Walmart World magazine. He has done the novelizations for such films as Boggy Creek: The Legend is True (Studio 3 Entertainment) and The Bloody Rage of Bigfoot (Great Lake films). The first book of his Bigfoot War series was adapted into a feature film by Origin releasing in 2014. Werewolf Massacre at Hell’s Gate was the second of his books to be adapted into film in 2015.  Major Japanese publisher, Takeshobo, recently bought the reprint rights to his Kaiju Apocalypse series (with Jason Cordova) and it is slated for 2018 release in Japan. Ring of Fire Press will be releasing a collected edition of his Monster Society stories (set in the New York Times Best-selling world of Eric Flint’s 1632) later this year.  In addition to his fiction, Eric also writes an award-winning comic book news column entitled “Comics in a Flash.” Eric lives in North Carolina with his wife and two children where he continues to write tales of the hungry dead, blazing guns, and the things that lurk in the woods.

 

About Steven L. Shrewsbury: 

 

Award winning author Steven L. Shrewsbury lives and works in Central Illinois. He writes hardcore sword & sorcery and horror novels. Twenty of his novels have been published, including Born of Swords, Within, Overkill, Philistine, Hell Billy, Thrall, Blood & Cell, Stronger Than Death, Hawg, Tormentor and Godforsaken. His horror/western series includes Bad Magick, Last Man Screaming and the forthcoming Mojo Hand. He has collaborated with Brian Keene on the two works King of the Bastards and Throne of the Bastards and Peter Welmerink on the Viking saga Bedlam Unleashed. A big fan of books, history, guns, the occult, religion and sports, he tries to seek out brightness in the world, wherever it may hide.
 

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