Blood Red

Table of Contents

 

 

Praise for
BLOOD RED

“FAST-MOVING with a good mix of sex, gore, and laughs . . . Moore knows how to keep the pages turning and the blood running. Sad, introspective vampires in powdered wigs need not apply.”
—Page Horrific

“
BLOOD RED
DOES WHAT ALL THE BEST VAMPIRE NOVELS DO; it . . . digs for blood beneath the skin.”

—Rick Kleffel,
The Agony Column

“OFFERS PLENTY OF . . . HORROR CHILLS leavened with flashes of humor.”
—Publishers Weekly

“THE COMPARISONS TO VINTAGE STEPHEN KING ARE JUSTIFIED. Brutal and scary,
Blood Red
has restored my faith, not only in the vampire subgenre, but in horror as a whole.” —Kealan Patrick Burke

“THERE IS SO MUCH TO ENJOY ABOUT
BLOOD RED
. Moore is powerfully descriptive.”

—
Baryon-online.com

“MOORE HAS WOVEN TOGETHER THE BEST THREADS OF VAMPIRE LORE with lust, power, and brutality . . . Grab this treat, turn off the phone and enjoy a refreshingly inventive take on the vampire tale.”

—Monsters and
Critics.com

Praise for
SERENITY FALLS
and the Serenity Falls Trilogy:
WRIT IN BLOOD THE PACK DARK CARNIVAL

“QUITE POSSIBLY THE BEST HORROR NOVEL SINCE
SALEM’S LOT
. [It] will grab you and horrify you while maintaining a death grip on your interest throughout. This is the ultimate page-turner . . . Fully fleshed, well developed characters. Immerse them in a great plot and superb action where the menace and mystery increase with each paragraph and you have a truly important novel. James A. Moore’s
Serenity Falls
shows some of the strength of a young Stephen King, some of the flavor of the current Bentley Little and a dash of the wit and perverseness of Dean Koontz. In the end,
Serenity Falls
is a major accomplishment in the horror field. Read it and you will echo my praise.”
—
Jim Brock,
Baryon-online.com

“INTENSIFYING TERROR.” —The Best
Reviews.com

“A TREMENDOUS HORROR STORY WORTHY OF THE MASTERS. James A. Moore is perhaps the most talented writer of this genre to date.”
—Midwest Book Review

“A SPRAWLING EPIC . . . Moore creates and develops a whole population’s worth of memorable characters . . . This is easily the best horror novel to appear this year. It’s more ambitious than the last three novels you’ve read put together. If there’s any justice in the world, James A. Moore will be the genre’s next superstar. He’s the only horror author out there who’s already writing at the level of the modern greats. The name James A. Moore will soon be spoken in the same reverent tones we now speak of King, Straub, and Koontz. Count on it.” —Garrett Peck

“YOU’RE GOING TO GET YOUR MONEY’S WORTH WITH THIS ONE, in terms of both quality and quantity. You’ll become immersed very quickly, and once caught up in the story, you’ll find it difficult to put the book away until you’ve finished it.”
—Chronicle

“BRINGS TO MIND EARLY STEPHEN KING—think of it as
Dawson’s Creek
as written by King. In
Serenity Falls
, James A. Moore has written a novel where all hell breaks loose—literally. His descriptions of small town quirks and foibles hit the mark on all cylinders . . . a great horror novel.” —James Argendeli, CNN Headline News

THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
Published by the Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

BLOOD RED

A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with the author

PRINTING HISTORY
Earthling Publications hardcover edition / October 2005
Berkley mass-market edition / September 2007

Copyright © 2005 by James A. Moore.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

ISBN: 978-1-4406-1912-0

BERKLEY®
Berkley Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
BERKLEY® is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
The “B” design is a trademark belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

No book is written alone and truer words have never been spoken. The author would like to thank Paul Miller for his insights, kind words of encouragement, and enthusiasm. Thanks also to my wife, Bonnie, for her amazing patience and love. You have always been and remain my heart and soul. Thanks also to Kelly Perry, one of the finest editors I have ever had the pleasure of working with. Under incredible time constraints, Kelly kept me on track and made
Blood Red
five times the book it would have been otherwise. For those reasons and a thousand others, this book is dedicated with awe and admiration to the people listed above. Thank you, more than I can say with mere words, thank you.

—James A. Moore

QUOTH THE RAVEN

AN INTRODUCTION BY SIMON CLARK

“Stone the crows.” A figure of speech uttered in exclamation. “A murder of crows.” A collective noun for a gathering of crows. There are more, including the evocative “a story-telling of crows.”

These devourers of corpse meat are found pretty much across the planet. There are over a hundred different species of the crow family, including the carrion, hooded, and American crows, plus rooks, jays, choughs, jackdaws, and Poe’s iconic raven. Some are big and ominous-looking; as dark as black holes in the sky. Several of the species are small. One is even white.

Crows can be metaphor for the horror story. In the best tradition of Hitchcock’s
The Birds,
crows tend not to arrive in a single battalion. A murder of crows assembles in ones or twos. You don’t notice them infiltrating your neighborhood until suddenly you realize your house, or that children’s climbing frame, is full of the black-feathered daemonic creatures. For me, the best horror stories are like that. The horror begins with a gradual accumulation of off-key details at near-subliminal level in an otherwise harmonious environment. The reader outside the book—and the hero inside the covers—doesn’t realize that anything is seriously amiss until it’s too late.

That’s why horror is subversive. It infiltrates the reader’s mind before it launches its attack. Sit with friends and discuss favorite horror movies and stories. A goodly bunch of those mentioned will feature an everyday, safe environment. Or what should be a safe environment. The home for instance. How many horror stories begin with the hero and family moving house to a new home only to find they hear footsteps on the stairs at the dead of night, or the lavatory inexplicably flushing? Psychologists will admit that the home and the self are inextricably linked. So the notion of your house being invaded or haunted by a ghost is, in effect, a metaphor for an invasion or haunting of one’s mind. And one thing our culture teaches us is this: what should be our one safe place in the world—our home—is hideously vulnerable to supernatural attack. As children, didn’t we fear the monster under the bed? Ghosts are already in the woodwork. Vampires, zombies, and assorted ghouls soon find a way across the threshold (heck, even those starlings in
The Birds
. . . remember the gush of our feathered friends down the chimney?). And it doesn’t matter whether you’re playwright-turned-caretaker in a swanky mountain hotel or a man of God. They’re coming to get you.

Case in point: in 1715, the Reverend Samuel Wesley, father of John Wesley, one of the founders of the Methodist Church, experienced a poltergeist infestation at their home, the Epworth Rectory in England. At night he and his family were alarmed to hear groans and weird howling from the attic, accompanied by frenzied banging. Frequently, he was woken at night by what sounded like torrents of coins cascading onto the floor and the crash of breaking bottles. But when he investigated, he found nothing visibly amiss. Members of the household glimpsed a strange figure in white. His children eventually called the specter Old Jeffrey. See, no one’s safe.

Nor are the inhabitants of the peacefully affluent Black Stone Bay, Rhode Island, in
Blood Red
. Oh, they think they’re in no danger, but just as the crows settle unnoticed one by one on their houses, a sinister infiltration has already begun in Black Stone Bay.

In this novel of James A. Moore’s you’re going to encounter crows aplenty, and that’s as much of the plot as I’m giving away. Of course, I can let other things slip . . . Quick! While the publisher’s out of the room! Come close and listen:

Blood Red
is a beautifully written horror novel. The easy-going loquacious style is deceptive. Take it from me: anything that reads so well, with such attention to detail, is damnably hard to write. This prose style is the product of years of hard work, of staying home with the blinds shut when everyone else is out having fun in the sunshine. James A. Moore has paid his dues, honed his craft, and now the delight is all yours in reading a powerful and witty story, which opens in the elegantly tantalizing way that is the mark of exceptional talent. Pun intended but there’s a rich vein of humor here as well as horror. Despite the carnage of the climax, the ending is genuinely poignant, too. And as you read, you’re forgiven if you exclaim more than once “Stone the crows!” It’s a kind of book that unveils surprise after surprise.