THE REVIEW:
Max, CPS investigator, is on the trail of several mysterious child disappearances. Max digs through trailer trash hovels, neo-nazi meth dealers, and every form of Deliverance-backwater scum you can find rotting in a 1970's singlewide. The search for these phantom missing children seems to dead end every which way ... the parents can't remember they ever had children.
Its the memory blackout that proves who's behind these heinous crimes. Damn vampires are at it again, erasing minds, stealing children and selling them off to vampire truckers and pedophiles.
This is every CPS worker's nightmare case, and no one in the department can handle it, except Max. He's immune to vampire glamour, sees right through their bullshit. Forced into a deadly alliance with rival vampires, Max plays supernatural politics to his advantage and brings down the hammer of retribution.
I'll never be able to look at a trailer park the same way again.
Moth delves into the darkest depths of child exploitation in America, while seamlessly blending in a hidden underworld of supernatural nasties. An intense genre-bender of urban fantasy, horror, thriller, mystery-suspense, with a splatter of steamy, erotica.
Definitely my kind of novel, a SOLID FIVE STAR READ ★★★★★
THE BLURB:
Social worker Max Hollingsworth is
no stranger to monsters. Supernatural or human, he's faced all kinds. But when
he's called upon to investigate a missing child, he may have met his match.
Children are vanishing, not just
from the streets, but from their parents' memories. Max's investigation leads
him to a gang of neo-Nazi vampires running a child slavery ring. There, he
comes face to face with the deadliest enemy he's ever met, their charismatic
and powerful leader Boone.
Running low on hope and options to
find the missing children, Max turns to his friends for help. But even they
aren't enough. Forced to face the darkness of his own past, Max forges an
alliance with the least likely ally of all. An enemy whose cruelty was almost
his end, and haunts him still.
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About
Sean T. Poindexter
Though born in Mesa,
Arizona, Sean has spent most of his life in Missouri. After college, Sean went
into social and investigative work, primarily with disabled adults and seniors.
Sean’s background in sociology, criminology, and philosophy and his experience
as an investigator for the State of Missouri, are heavy influences in his
writing.
While Sean has been writing most of his life, he did not consider
doing so professionally until he was inspired by a terrible vampire movie.
During the film, Sean amused himself by imagining the vampires being attacked
by a dragon. His imagination resulted in his series, The Dragon’s Blood Chronicles, featuring dragons and vampires.
Sean enjoys watching and reading science fiction, fantasy,
horror, and thrillers. His hobbies include playing Xbox, fantasy role playing
games and collecting firearms.
Moth is Book 1 of The Max Hollingsworth Paranormal Mysteries.
Sean's other books include The Shadow of
Tiamet and The Will of the Darkest
One, both from The Dragon’s Blood
Chronicles.
Praise
for Moth
"Brutal honesty and raw emotion bleeds on every page
as Max survives his challenges only because he is too busy to stop for
death." Wendy Russo, author January
Black
Excerpt
from Moth - Chapter 1
Chapter
One
“Don’t you usually come in pairs?”
Officer Unruh smiled and nodded. “Yes, sir.”
Max grinned. “You just get out?”
“Yes, sir. US Marines.”
“Ah…yeah, I recognize the haircut.” It wasn’t
just that. Max stood a foot over him at six feet, but the patrolman made up for
it with broad arms and a big chest. He didn’t look like he needed a partner.
And then there was this “sir” business…
“Have you been doing this long?”
“I’ve been with the Joplin PD for five
months. And you?”
Max drummed his fingers on the bag hanging
from his shoulder. “I’ve been a social worker long enough to know which house
on this street we’re going to, even without looking at the numbers.” It was the
one without siding, just bare insulation boards nailed to the outer wall.
“Yes, sir.”
Max didn’t resent Unruh’s presence; he just
didn’t think it was necessary. He’d taken cops with him lots of times, and on a
few of those instances, it turned out he’d needed them. But Brian insisted the
workers take cops with them anytime an allegation of drugs was involved in a
hotline. It irritated him for a number of reasons, not the least of which
happened to be that Brian’s job used to be his.
That was another story…
The lawn was overgrown and the wooden porch
sagged, but they arrived at the door without incident. Max knew the drill. The
burly young policeman stepped to the side of the locked screen door and
knocked. A few seconds later, an interior door opened and a man’s face appeared
behind the filthy fly screen. Max had been expecting a woman.
“Is Donna here?” The man looked at Max with
bulging, bloodshot eyes that darted back to the cop as though expecting a
friendlier face. Whatever look Unruh gave, it wasn’t what he’d hoped. He
returned to Max, who repeated the question.
“She’s not here.”
It was eight thirty in the morning, so if she
worked she might have been there. Max didn’t have employer information for the
mother. Also, he kind of doubted she had a job.
Unruh rattled the latch a bit, but it didn’t
budge. “Sir, could you unlock the door please?”
“What’s this about?”
Max stepped to the screen and held up his
plastic ID badge. It said Max Hollingsworth in big letters under a rather
unflattering picture of him. The bulging-eyed man looked at the ID then back up
at Max. He looked surprised. He shouldn’t have been.
“Sir,” repeated Unruh, “Could you unlock the
door please?”
He looked back to Unruh and nodded. After a
click, the door swung open. Max and the patrolman entered the home.
The look on Unruh’s face implied disgust. Max
grinned, he really hadn’t been doing this long. The home was a mess, but Max
had seen worse—far worse. In a very short time, so would Unruh. Places like
this would become normal for him. Max remembered when this kind of mess would
have bothered him, too.
The term “shithole” was tossed around so
much, but it wasn’t that bad. The awkwardly rectangular living room smelled
like dog and had a few plastic microwave food boats piled on an old coffee
table. Despite the smell, there was no dog in sight. The most expensive piece
of furniture in the room, probably the house, was a flat screen television. It
was paused on an image of a video console football game. The wireless
controller rested on a ratty couch covered by a slightly less ratty blanket.
“Donna’s sleeping—”
“You said Donna wasn’t here.” Max glanced
over his shoulder. The man wore dirty grey boxer shorts and a plaid robe. He’d
forgone the courtesy of a shirt, so his guests were treated to ribs poking
through the mole-speckled, pasty skin of a man who rarely left the house.
“Yeah,” he replied with a dirty chuckle. “I
saw the cop and said that.” He looked at Unruh like he thought the cop would be
amused. The cop was not, so he looked away.
Max produced a small notebook and pen from
the bag hanging at his side. “Who are you?”
“I’m Jim…I live with Donna.”
“You sleep on the couch?” He gestured to it.
Jim shook his head.
“Only in the day.”
Must be nice, Max thought, sleeping in the
day. “You work nights, then?” Max had perfected the art of over-tact, being a
complete dick without getting punched. The people he dealt with didn’t tend to
get subtlety. Unruh’s grin showed he got it—the cops usually did. They both
knew the answer already.
“Naw, I’m what you’d call unemployed.”
He thought about asking him to elaborate:
What exactly do you mean by, unemployed, sir? But that might be overdoing it.
White trash will only tolerate so much subtle condescension.
“Would you call Donna unemployed?” Max asked,
after collecting pedigree information; Jim’s last name, date of birth, social
security number. Max was always surprised when people gave all that to him,
especially the social security number.
“No, she works at Macey’s.” That was not to
be confused with Macy’s, the retail giant. Macey’s was a chain of convenience
stores/gas stations. Joplin had ninety of them or something.
“Is Madolla in her room?”
“No, she sleeps downstairs.”
Max crooked an eye. “Donna or Madolla?”
“Madolla. She’s around the corner, in the
kitchen.”
Max stopped writing. “The baby sleeps in the
kitchen?” He looked at the entrance to the dining room. Presumably the kitchen
was beyond that, behind the stairs.
“The baby keeps us up if she’s in the room.”
“Yeah, they’ll do that.”
Max walked around the corner. The stairs were
wooden and covered with peeling brown paint. A few of them were cracked. They
ended in a carpeted second floor. The dining room lacked a table, and the
kitchen beyond was full of dirty dishes and flies. A few feet from a neglected
refrigerator sat a playpen, apparently doing double-duty as a baby bed.
“Let me get Donna’s ass out of bed…”
Unruh stepped in from of Jim as he tried to
leave.
“Not just yet.” Max approached the pen. Jim
followed, but Unruh stopped him at the dining room entrance.
“I think Donna should be here, I can’t just
let anyone see her kid you know—”
“I’m not ‘just anyone’...I work for the
State.”
“She’s sleeping.” He seemed to be gauging his
chances of darting past Unruh without being tackled…or perhaps his odds of survival
if it occurred. He chose the prudent path. “If you wake her up, Donna’ll be
pissed. She cries a lot.”
“They’ll do that, too.”
“She was crying for like, hours last night.”
Aside from the slight dirty-diaper smell,
Madolla and her pen were clean and well taken care of. The report said she was
six months old, but she looked like a newborn. She was lying on her belly,
still and peaceful. Max started to smile…
“She was bawling all night, until about four
this morning.”
“When was the last time you or Donna checked
her?” Max lowered his hand into the pen and pressed his fingers to her little
scalp.
“Checked her?”
“To see why she was crying.”
“I turned up the TV and she cried herself
out.”
“When?”
“When what?”
“When did she stop crying?”
Jim scratched his scalp through greasy brown
hair. “Like three or something. It usually takes longer.”
Max withdrew his hand from the pen and wrote
all that down. The tap of pen on paper competed evenly with the soft hum of the
refrigerator condenser.
“Officer Unruh, can you call an ambulance
please?”
Jim’s eyes widened. “Ambulance?”
Unruh didn’t ask any questions. The
distraught look on his face showed he didn’t need to. Unruh stepped away from
Jim to the living room and pressed the button on his shoulder communicator.
“Oh, shit… Should I wake Donna?” Jim stepped
closer to Max so he didn’t interrupt the stream of ambulance-summoning cop
jargon.
“That would be a good idea,” Max kept his
voice as flat as possible, but under the circumstances his bile filter was a
little taxed.
“Shit! What do I tell her? Is Madolla okay?”
Max turned his eyes to the pen.
“She’s dead.”
Sean’s
Links:
Ellysian Press is pleased to
announce the release of Moth by Sean
T. Poindexter on August 5, 2014. The editor is Jen Ryan and cover art is by Jeremy
Lovett.
Isle of the Dead – In 1945, Boris Karloff appeared in one of twovampire films he ever made. This black and white classic, based onGreek folklore and growing fear in the face of death, is many ways more about fear of the undead than the vampires themselves. During one of the many horrible yet relatively small Balkans of the early XXth century, a Greek general and a collection of others find themselves trapped on an island due to plague. In an almost Agatha Christie-like setup, superstitions bubble to the surface and gothic tropes we all recognize become reality, at least in some people’s minds.
Strigoi – Somewhat curiously (or not) we rarely see vampire movies from Romania, the land where the real Vlad the Impaler lived. Here is an exception, a clever dark comedy based not upon the image from Hollywood but actual folklore–where a vampire is a peasant, with neither priest nor scholar about the undead are anywhere to be seen, where the reaction to an actual strigoi is openly mediocre, even stupid.;
ets Scare Jessica to Death – Again, a film that tosses away what we expect we know about vampires, and in fact gives us a tiny existential crisis to boot! Jessica, an artist moving to a farm in rural America to get away from the hustle of the city, has had a nervous breakdown. She’s been delusional, but does that mean the stranger she and her husband meet is not an undead girl haunting the lake where she drowned? We may never know. But we feel exactly what Jessica endures, putting us through an emotional wringer.
ets Scare Jessica to Death – Again, a film that tosses away what we expect we know about vampires, and in fact gives us a tiny existential crisis to boot! Jessica, an artist moving to a farm in rural America to get away from the hustle of the city, has had a nervous breakdown. She’s been delusional, but does that mean the stranger she and her husband meet is not an undead girl haunting the lake where she drowned? We may never know. But we feel exactly what Jessica endures, putting us through an emotional wringer.
Suck – This Canadian comedy about a fourth-rate band achieving stardom once a member is bitten and transformed into a walking, talking, singing and bass-playing incarnation of dark glamor never got much distribution. But the performances are spot-on, and the humor sickly fun if not broad a la the Scary Movies franchise or anything at all with Adam Sandler.
Vampyr – Many consider Nosferatu the first great vampire movie. Less known alas is the flick widely regarded as the second, at least among film experts. Carl Dryer’s almost silent masterpiece is a surreal step into a world where shadows really do go commit mischief on their own, where dreams bleed into reality, and where the corrupt influence of a vampire lingers on the edge of conscious awareness–and even noticing the creature is perilous.
Bled – So many vampire films aim for being “high concept” (Dracula’s untold origin! An apocalyptic war between living and undead), here’s a flick deserving credit for focusing on an individual tale of temptation. Shot on a tiny budget with no stars, it succeeds in creating a very disturbing story about genuine horror, even to the point where sexual desire becomes grotesque and deadly ( a trope most vampire filmmakers dabble with at most, rather than dive into).
Lust for Dracula – The title, the stars, even the production company (Seduction Studios) leads one to expect nothing more than lesbian softcore with a vampire twist. Nor would anyone end up mistaken on that front. But the sheer surreal nature of the film shows the writer/director was aiming for something much more than titillation. He wants to disturb as much as excite, to amuse as well as horrify. Truth to tell, in many ways he succeeds!
