It has been about 2.5 – 3 years in the making, and finally The Rat King is free of my Macbook. He was last spotted at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and one haunted Borders which exists trapped between the reality of our world, where Borders no longer exists, and an alternate world, where Borders has become more powerful than the American government. The collection features four stories adapted by The NoSleep Podcast, three of which were on the pay side and might be new to many people. Also included is the story “Daddy Longlegs” which was awarded second place in the 2019 Writer’s Digest Annual Writing Competition for genre fiction.
A couple of years ago I reached out to an artist I found on Twitter asking if he was open for commissions. At the time I was mostly thinking about a cover image for the book, and I admit it was a strange and wonderful experience seeing art inspired by my writing. So, in addition to the cover I commissioned him (thank you Brett!) to create illustrations for each of the fourteen stories. I am obviously biased, but I love each of them. His images for “In the Valley of the Headless Men” and “A Sundown Town” are two standouts for me.
As I was finalizing The Rat King I began edits on my first collection, Dreadful: Tales of the Dead and Dying in preparation for a re-release from Velox Books. It’s amazing to me how far my writing has come in the last three or four years. I don’t know how to articulate that feeling without coming off as boastful. There were both positive and negative reviews for Dreadful, as can be expected. But as I worked to refine the collection I understood where those negative reviews came from. Ideas that didn’t quite make the leap from mind to pen, wording that was overly complicated because I thought good writing meant more syllables. Maybe in five years I will look back at The Rat King and think the same. I hope I do.
You can order a paperback, available through most book retailers (I recommend simply because the artwork deserves to be held) or ebook here.
Horror Stories by LP Hernandez 