BOOK FEATURE: Harmed and Dangerous by Jasper Bark

It’s a Southern Gothic, paranormal thriller, set in the steamy state of Louisiana. The plot involves time slips, small town horror and the mysteries surrounding an inscrutable serial killer.

It’s dark and deeply emotional and addresses LGBTQIA themes as well the intensely personal nature of father/daughter relationships.

BOOK LINK: AMAZON

COVER BLURB

Put yourself in Kyra’s place.

You're seventeen years old, lost and alone in a remote town in Louisiana. You're searching for the birth parents you never knew. The heat is crippling. The river often floods, washing houses away and lifting corpses from the ground.

The locals treat you with suspicion. You don't belong here. They're hiding something. All over town, in nooks and hidden alcoves, there’s evidence of a forbidden faith. They keep the old ways here, but no one will tell you what they are.

There's an intangible presence following you. Hiding in your peripheral vision. You can't see, hear or touch it, but you know it's there, waiting for its chance to claim you.

Then the episodes start.

Your vision goes and when it returns you're seeing the world as it was fifteen years ago. Physically you're in the present, but everything you see happened a decade and a half ago.

Suddenly you realize.

You’re seeing through the eyes of the serial killer who murdered your birth mother. He takes control of you, forcing you to watch as he stalks and brutally murders her.

And there’s nothing you can do to stop him. Because he died by lethal injection more than a decade ago.

BOOK LINK: AMAZON

Special essay from the author (Linzé - I love these!)

WHAT I LEARNED WRITING ABOUT REAL VOODOO

  Like all paranormal thrillers, my latest novel, HARMED AND DANGEROUS has a supernatural element. The people of Yeuxville, the small town where the novel is set, keep “the old ways”, a set of customs and magical practises that are older than their town, their state and even their country.

  In writing about these practices, I drew almost exclusively on Voodoo and other African diasporic religions like Candomblé and Santeria. Beliefs that date all the way back to the African kingdom of Benin. Beliefs carried over to the new world by the people captured and sold into slavery, who mixed their ancient beliefs with the Catholicism of the countries to which they were taken. This in turn created new religions which are some of the fastest growing in the world, even today. I have a personal and first hand experience of these beliefs and practices.

  When I was writing my fourth novel WAY OF THE BAREFOOT ZOMBIE, for Abaddon Books, rather than writing about the zombie apocalypse, I decided to go back to the origins of the zombie myth in Voodoo. But I didn’t want to misrepresent the religion in the way I’d seen so many writers do in the past. So, I did a lot of research and I reached out to some important practitioners. One of these was Simone Brightstein, who became a dear friend and practically a member of our family.

  I discovered that when you write an authentic Voodoo ritual that’s intended to summon one of the deities, who are called Loa in Voodoo and Orisha in Santeria, they can actually turn up. In your mind at least, which is where all the action in a novel takes place. Not only do they turn up, but they take over the story. When they appeared, I didn’t write any dialogue, I took dictation. The words spilled out almost faster than I could put them down. And the Loas decide what’s going to happen next, not the author.

  Toward the end of the novel, the Loa known as Papa Legba, who opens the way for all the other Loas, decided to change my story. He told Brigitte, a Mambo, or Voodoo priestess, that he wanted another of my characters, Tatyana, to stay on the island where the novel was set and become one of his followers. This completely changed what I had planned for my ending. But I knew enough at this point not to go against Papa Legba. Especially as he gave a little speech explaining why she should become his follower.

  About a week later, I was contacted by Simone, a priestess of Santeria. She said she’d been contacted by Elegguá, the Orisha equivalent of Papa Legba, with an important message for me. So important, he insisted she write it down, because he told her he wanted me to become his follower. She emailed me the message and it was so close to the speech Papa Legba had made in my novel that some sentences were almost word for word.

  I’d never had something like this happen to me before. I was quite shocked. As Elegguá instructed her, Simone had the altar she devoted to him packed up and shipped to me. I was to make regular offerings to it and be mindful of the Orisha. It sits in my study to this day, in fact, as I write this, it needs to be dusted. And yes, I make regular offerings.

  Papa Legba/Elegguá appears in the pages of HARMED AND DANGEROUS. His presence in this novel is more subtle, but no less powerful. You’ll meet him when you read the ARC. And maybe, he’ll change your life too.

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AUTHOR BIO

Multiple award-winning author, Jasper Bark is infectious – and there’s no known cure. If you’re reading this you’re already contaminated. The symptoms will manifest any time soon. There’s nothing you can do about it.

There’s no itching or unfortunate rashes, but you’ll become obsessed with his mind-bending books.

From the acclaimed Draw You In trilogy and the ground breaking Bark Bites Horror series, to graphic novels like Bloodfellas and Beyond Lovecraft.

Then you’ll want to tell everyone else about his visionary horror. About its originality, its wild imagination and how it takes you to the edge of your sanity. We’re afraid there’s no way to avoid this. These words contain a power you’re hopeless to resist.

You’re already in their thrall, you know you are. You’re itching to read all of Jasper’s bloodstained books.

Don’t fight this urge, embrace it. You’ve been bitten by the Bark bug and you love it.

LINKS

Website: www.jasperbark.com

FB: https://www.facebook.com/jasperbark/

INSTA: https://www.instagram.com/barkjasper/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXsjQ4vXFQzUOhK1oRLok9w