BooksChatter: ☀❏ In Shadows Waiting

Following our Cover Reveal on 24 July, thank you for joining us on the Release Day Party for In Shadows Waiting, a supernatural horror by Stewart Bint (3 August 2015, BookTrope, 158 pages).

This is the second edition of In Shadows Waiting, which has been completely re-edited!

PREVIEW: Check out the book's synopsis and excerpt below. Read the first Three chapters with Amazon Look Inside.

Please do take part: comment on our post and follow the tour where you will be able to read other excerpts (☀), interviews (ℚ), reviews (✍) and guest blog posts (✉).

Synopsis | Teaser | About the Author | Tour Stops

Synopsis

Young Simon Reynolds lives a bucolic life at his family home, White Pastures, surrounded by a loving family and a charming community.

Simon finishes his A levels and looks forward to unwinding while his sisters work on their tans.
Meanwhile the tiny community of Meriton has been plagued by a spate of burglaries, and White Pastures seems to be next. A shadowy figure stalks the house, but the police can find no signs of an intruder.

Inspired by the author's real-life experience with the supernatural, In Shadows Waiting recounts a summer that changes the Reynolds' lives forever. As the summer progresses, the shadows take on an altogether more sinister implication, and White Pastures begins to reveal a terrifying secret.

The epicenter of an event that has scarred an entire community, White Pastures grows more and more dark, possessed by a shadow that yearns, a shadow that will not be denied. At White Pastures, someone will die -- but love never will.

Teaser: Excerpt

CHAPTER 1: MEMORIES

Today’s memories, 2014

THE CREATURE’S TRIUMPHANT LAUGH was something that would be with me until my dying day. And something I never wanted to hear again.

It was the strongest memory to stir as I looked at the photo whose colours had dimmed with age. Thirty-two years ago it was vibrant and full of life. Just like the faces staring back at me from the time before shadows. From the time before torment. From the time when we were happy.

It all reminded me of when the world was young and innocent— hell, when I was young and innocent. My two daughters both started sleeping with their boyfriends as soon as they turned sixteen, probably before then if the truth were told. If they had, it was something both they and my wife kept from me. But it was a different era when my sisters were that age. Helen and her Mark. Sarah and the succession of boyfriends she brought to our home, White Pastures.

I rarely smile now. Even after thirty-two years, the memories are painful. Fifty now. A half century. I was eighteen then. Yet in some ways it still seems like only yesterday.

Time plays tricks. A tear rolls down my cheek.

***

Earlier memories, 1983

AS SARAH WHIRLED to face me, I caught sight of the sheepish grin that always crept over her full ruby lips whenever she felt guilty.

“Simon!” she laughed, hesitantly. “I. . .I was just. . .” She faltered as she followed my gaze to the photograph gripped in her left hand. In the split second before she turned back to the window I glimpsed tears in her deep blue eyes, and put my arm comfortingly around her shoulders.

Gently, I eased the picture from her grasp and looked at the two faces framed there, captured twelve months earlier by the portrait lens of Dad’s Pentax. One could have been Sarah five years into the future— the same silky blonde hair tumbled past the shoulders, the same impish eyes and smiling mouth. The only difference was that the cheeks in the photo showed a trace of blusher and the eyelids a hint of misty blue. There was no mistaking the girl in the picture for anyone other than Sarah’s older sister.

The second face, pressed tightly against the girl’s, featured sad brown eyes, a long tapering black nose, and a body entirely covered with rusty hair. Our poor red setter, Titus, had always posed beautifully when he saw a camera.

I glanced up through the window to the young cherry tree flourishing at the side of the lawn, hinting its intention to tower strong and firm in years to come. It marked Titus’s grave. We had buried him in the part of the garden where he loved to play and planted the tree in his memory.

This was not the first time I had found Sarah standing at her bedroom window, photograph in hand, looking out at the tree, and I could guess what was going through her mind. Not only did it remind us of happier times, it also served to recall the full horror our family had recently come through.

The horror that began on the day of my final A level examination.

In Shadows Waiting - available NOW!

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About the Author

Stewart Bint is a novelist (science fiction and supernatural) signed by Booktrope, also a magazine columnist and PR writer for one of the world's leading CAD/CAM software developers.

Previous roles include radio presenter, newsreader and phone-in host.

He lives with his wife Sue in Leicestershire in the UK; they have two grown children, Christopher and Charlotte, and a budgie called Alfie.

Novels: In Shadows Waiting; Timeshaft; The Jigsaw And The Fan; Malfunction; Ashday's Child.
Short story collection: Thunderlands.
Non fiction: Up Close And Personal

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