Hello lovelies! Today I’m very excited to be taking part in the Blog Tour to celebrate the release of Good Neighbours by Sarah Langan and I’m grateful to Titan Books for having me along! I have a shiny excerpt for you, but first here’s the blurb!

Welcome to Maple Street, a picture-perfect slice of suburban Long Island, its residents bound by their children, their work, and their illusion of safety in a rapidly changing world.
Arlo Wilde, a gruff has-been rock star who’s got nothing to show for his fame but track marks, is always two steps behind the other dads. His wife, beautiful ex-pageant queen Gertie, feels socially ostracized and adrift. Spunky preteen Julie curses like a sailor and her kid brother Larry is called “Robot Boy” by the kids on the block.
Their next-door neighbor and Maple Street’s Queen Bee, Rhea Schroeder—a lonely community college professor repressing her own dark past—welcomes Gertie and family into the fold. Then, during one spritzer-fueled summer evening, the new best friends share too much, too soon.
As tensions mount, a sinkhole opens in a nearby park, and Rhea’s daughter Shelly falls inside. The search for Shelly brings a shocking accusation against the Wildes that spins out of control. Suddenly, it is one mom’s word against the other’s in a court of public opinion that can end only in blood.
A riveting and ruthless portrayal of American suburbia, Good Neighbors excavates the perils and betrayals of motherhood and friendships and the dangerous clash between social hierarchy, childhood trauma, and fear.

If that’s got you intrigued, which I hope it has, then please read on as I have an exclusive extract for you:

118 Maple Street

Friday, July 9

     “It’s a hairbrush night,” Rhea Schroeder called up the stairs to her daughter Shelly. “Don’t forget to use extra conditioner. I hate that look on your face when I hit a knot.” 

     She waited at the landing. Heard rustling up there. She had four kids. Three still lived at home. She had a husband, too, only she rarely saw him. It’s unnatural, being the sole grown-up in a house for twenty-plus years. You talk to yourself. You spin. 

     “You hear me?” 

     “Yup!” Shelly bellowed back down. “I HEAR you!” 

     Rhea sat back down at her dining room table. She tried to focus her attention on the Remedial English Composition papers she was supposed to grade. The one on top argued that the release of volcanic ash was the cheapest and smartest solution to global warming. Plus, you’d get all those gorgeous sunsets! Because she taught college, a lot of Maple Street thought she had a glamorous job. These people were wrong. She did not correct them, but they were absolutely, 100 percent wrong. 

     Rhea pushed the papers away. Sipped from the first glass of Malbec she’d poured for the night, got up, and scanned the mess out her window.

     She couldn’t see the sinkhole. It was in the middle of the park, less than a half mile away. But she could see the traffic cones surrounding it, and the trucks full of fill sand, ready to dump. Though work crews had laid down plywood to cover the six-foot-square gape, a viscous slurry had surfaced, caking its edges. The slurry was a fossil fuel called bitumen, found in deep pockets all over Long Island. It threaded outward in slender seams and was mostly contained within the park, but in places had reached under the sidewalks, bubbling up on neighbors’ lawns. There was a scientific explanation, something about polarity and metal content. Global warming and cooked earth. She couldn’t remember exactly, but the factors that made the sinkhole had also galvanized Long Island’s bitumen to coalesce in this one spot.

     All that to say, Sterling Park looked like an oozing wound.

     They never did find the German shepherd. Their theory was that a strong current in the freshwater aquifer down there had carried him away. They’d likened it to falling through ice in a frozen pond, and trying to swim your way back to the opening.

     He could be anywhere. Even below her feet. Funny to think.

     This evening, the crescent was especially quiet. Several families had left town for vacations or to get away from the candy apple fumes. Those who remained, if they were home at all, stayed inside.

     Just then, pretty Gertie Wilde emerged from 116’s garage. She carried a haphazardly coiled garden hose, its extra slack spilling down like herniated intestines. Gertie’s big hair was coiffed, her metallic silver eye shadow so glistening that Rhea could see it from a hundred feet away. She stopped when she got to the front yard, hose in hand.

     Rhea’s pulse jogged.

     Gertie peered inside Rhea’s house, right where Rhea was standing. She seemed frightened and small out there, like a kid holding a broken toy, and suddenly, Rhea understood—Gertie had no outdoor spigot to which to attach her hose. She needed to borrow. But because of the way Rhea had acted at the Fourth of July barbeque, she was afraid to ask.

     A thrill rose in Rhea’s chest.

     Margie Walsh screwed it up. She came out from the house on the other side of Gertie’s and walked fast to meet her. Waves and smiles. Rhea didn’t hear the small talk, but she saw their laughter. Polite at first, and then relaxed. They hooked the hose, then unrolled a plastic yellow bundle, running it the length of the Walsh and Wilde lawns. Water gushed and sprayed. A Slip ’N Slide. With the temperature lingering at 108 degrees, its water emerged like an oasis in a desert.

     Pretty soon, Margie’s and Gertie’s kids came out. Fearless Julia Wilde gave herself ten feet of running buildup, then threw herself against the plastic and slid all the way down until she landed on grass. Charlie Walsh followed. Each took a few turns before they could convince rigid Larry. At last, he did it, too. But Larry, uncoordinated and holding Robot Boy, didn’t build enough momentum. Only slid halfway.

          The lawn got torn up. The kids got covered in mud and then hosed themselves off and started over. Tar from the sinkhole stuck to their clothes and skin like Dalmatian motley.

     Now that the seal was broken, all of Maple Street opened up and shook loose. The rest of the Rat Pack and some of their parents streamed out. Laughter turned to screams of delight as even the grown-ups joined in.

     Rhea watched through her window. The laughter and screams were loud enough that muffled versions of them permeated the glass.

     Gertie didn’t know any better. With her central air-conditioning broken, she’d probably gotten used to that slightly sweet chemical scent. The rest of them were stir-crazy. Figured, if a pregnant woman was willing to take the risk, the rest of them were pansies not to go out, too.

     But anybody who watches decent science fiction knows that the EPA isn’t perfect. The stuff her neighbors were rolling around in tonight might glue their lungs with emphysema twenty years from now. Even her husband, Fritz, who never had an opinion about anything domestic, had announced that if the hole didn’t get filled like it was supposed to, they ought to pack the family into a short-term rental. He’d crinkled his nose that very first night it happened, grudging fear in his eyes, and said, “When it smells like this in the lab, we turn on the ventilation hoods and leave the room.”

     Rhea ought to warn these people. She was obliged, for their safety. But if she did that, they’d think she was a killjoy. They’d think it had to do with Gertie.

     She played the conversation out in her head. She’d go out to 116, trespassing on Gertie’s property, and urge them to go home. To take hot showers with strong soap. They’d put down their beers, nod in earnest agreement, wait for her to go away, and then start having fun again. Probably, they wouldn’t say anything mean about her once she was gone. Not openly. But she knew the people of Maple Street. They’d chuckle.

     She backed away from her window.

     Returned to her papers. Sipped a little more Malbec as she reviewed the next assignment in the pile, which was written in 7-point, Old English font. It was about how the last stolen election had proven that democracy didn’t work. We needed to move into Fascism, only without the Nazis, the student argued. She took out her red pen. Wrote, What???? Nazis = Fascism; they’re like chocolate and peanut butter!

     Between the papers, the people outside, her husband at work, and even her children upstairs, Rhea felt very alone right then. Misunderstood and too smart for this world. All the while, Slip ’N Slide laughter surrounded the house. It pushed against the stone and wood and glass. She wished she could let it in.

Good Neighbours is available now through Titan Books as Paperback or Ebook

Hey everyone!

Today it’s my stop on the @The_WriteReads blog tour for The Gilded King by Josie Jaffrey! The Gilded King placed forth in the 2020 BBNYA Awards and I’m excited to be spotlighting this story for you today!

But what’s this about BBNYA? BBNYA is a yearly competition where book bloggers from all over the world read and score books written by indie authors!  BBNYA is brought to you in association with the Folio Society (If you love beautiful books you NEED to check out their website!) And the book blogger support group TheWriteReads.

If you are an author and wish to learn more about the 2021 BBNYA competition, you can visit the official website (https://www.bbnya.com/) or our Twitter account, @BBNYA_Official. If you would like to sign-up and enter your book, you can find the BBNYA 2021 AUTHOR SIGN UP FORM HERE. Please make sure to carefully read our terms and conditions before entering. 

If you are a book blogger or reviewer, you can apply to be part of BBNYA 2021 by filling out this form (also remember to read the terms and conditions before signing up)! 

But onto the book!

In the Blue, the world’s last city, all is not well.

Julia is stuck within its walls. She serves the nobility from a distance until she meets Lucas, a boy who believes in fairytales that Julia’s world can’t accommodate. The Blue is her prison, not her castle, and she’d escape into the trees if she didn’t know that contamination and death awaited humanity outside.

But not everyone in the Blue is human, and not everyone can be contained.

Beyond the city’s boundaries, in the wild forests of the Red, Cameron has precious little humanity left to lose. As he searches for a lost queen, he finds an enemy rising that he thought long dead. An enemy that the humans have forgotten how to fight.

One way or another, the walls of the Blue are coming down. The only question is what side you’ll be on when they do.

I read The Gilded King a couple of years ago and although I didn’t write a full review at the time, it was a richly woven and intriguing world clashing together Vampires and Zombies in a post apocalyptic virus fuelled frenzy! I rated it 4 Stars

About the Author

Recoil was my first read of March and it was an absolute blast! I loved every second of it and it was a total 5 Star read for me, It’s therefore doubly exciting for me to be part of this blog tour! Today I’m bringing you an exclusive excerpt and I hope that it draws you in as much as it did me, but first here’s a blurb to give you a flavour of the story.

Out on a salvage mission with a skeleton crew, Carter Langston is murdered by animated corpses left behind on this ship. Yet in this future, everyone’s consciousness backup can be safely downloaded into a brand-new body, and all you’d lose are the memories of what happened between your last backup and your death. But when Langston wakes up in his new body, he is immediately attacked in the medbay and has to fight once again for his life—and his immortality. Because this assassin aims to destroy his core forever.
Determined to find his shipmates and solve this evolving mystery, Langston locates their tech whiz Shay Chan, but two members are missing and perhaps permanently killed. Langston and Chan are soon running for their lives with the assassin and the corporation behind him in hot pursuit.
What Langston and Chan ultimately find would signal the end of humanity. What started as a salvage mission just might end up saving the world.

Excerpt

Fifteen minutes to live. I’d backed up, of course. I did before every run. But that was weeks ago. Time that would be lost, gone never to return. I had questions, so many questions. How had all these people died? Why had the engines suddenly fired? What had caused the coil to animate and attack me? 

Most importantly, where the hell was the Persephone? 

“Dammit,” I swore aloud. I didn’t have any answers, but it was worse than that. When it was over, when they re-coiled me, I wouldn’t even remember the fucking questions. 

I felt a bead of sweat trickle down my forehead. It wasn’t the stress, or adrenaline, or anything else. I had started to sweat because of the temperature. I brought up the suit diagnostics, splashing them across my vision. External temperature was rising. The suit’s enviro-suite was trying to compensate, engaging cooling units, but it was a losing battle. In about—I queried Sarah—sixteen more minutes, the sun was going to cook me. And things would likely get very unpleasant before that. 

So, what? Give up? My fingers twitched toward the Gauss gun at my hip. It would penetrate the suit’s helmet easily enough, and end things before they got too bad. But even knowing that the branch from a few weeks ago would be shoved into another coil, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. So, what? Wait for the end? 

Fuck that. 

Sarah? Estimate current acceleration.
Approximately one point oh-one G and climbing.
Just slightly heavier than normal. I flexed my fingers. I could deal with that.
I maneuvered on the acceleration chair, getting my feet beneath me. I forced my mind to reorient itself, to think of the direction of the chairs, the bulkhead behind me as “down.” It took some concentration, but when I opened my eyes, I was no longer being pressed back into an acceleration chair. Instead, I was standing on that chair. Above me was the back of another chair. More chairs descended below me, more above, forming a ladder. I reached out, and began to climb, moving over the discarded coils, pulling my body weight up against the increasing force of acceleration as I climbed “higher” into the ship. With the engines live and power coursing back into the derelict vessel, there was a chance the communications systems would be working. I doubted I could call for help—the Persephone wouldn’t be ignoring my calls if there wasn’t something interfering with the broader signals. But it was damn hard to stop comm laser from pinging a relay. I wasn’t getting out of this in one piece, but if I could make it as far as the bridge, maybe I could send some kind of message. 

The odds sucked, but that was the life of a scavenger. 

Recoil is out now and available through Titan Books!

This week saw the release of The Golden Key by Marian Womack, through Titan Books, a richly woven tale of mysterious disappearances, seances and sceptics set against the backdrop of a country in mourning for Queen Victoria.

London, 1901. After the death of Queen Victoria the city heaves with the uncanny and the eerie. Séances are held and the dead are called upon from darker realms.
Samuel Moncrieff, recovering from a recent tragedy of his own, meets Helena Walton-Cisneros, one of London’s most reputed mediums. But Helena is not what she seems and she’s enlisted by the elusive Lady Matthews to solve a twenty-year-old mystery: the disappearance of her three stepdaughters who vanished without a trace on the Norfolk Fens.
But the Fens are a liminal land, where folk tales and dark magic still linger. With locals that speak of devilmen and catatonic children found on the Broads, Helena finds the answer to the mystery leads back to where it started: Samuel Moncrieff.

I really enjoyed this book and I’m so excited to be able to share with you this exclusive excerpt!

This dismal place wasn’t a new landscape. Eliza’s father was from around here, from a place called Waltraud Water; and so she had spent a few years of her childhood coming down from Lincoln to the cottage for little holidays, all year round and in all kinds of weather. She knew of young college men skating in winter or sailing in summer all the way up to Ely, usually to find some girl or another. The short sailing boats with two cabins, climbing up the Little Ouse. Those were the memories of youth, she thought now, kinder than a summer’s breeze. Her father had recounted it with pride, that long-gone world of fishing, fowling, of common wetland that was self-sufficient, well managed, cared for. Of the domestic geese that supplied the whole country with quill pens, those long feathers she marvelled at when she was little. Wildfowling season, from May to September, ‘fen slodgers’ carrying their decoys, and their tame ducks. The overabundance of pasture. The dykes dug up among the reeds, practically unseen when covered by snow or grass. And the moments when the snow started to melt, with those spring tides in motion. And the lost children, and the children that died in the eerie floods, and the children who were lost even before being born. For of course, there was no fairy tale here, and those were treacherous roads, deadly if misunderstood. 

Crumbled churches like the one at Wicken Far End were a reminder that nature would reconquer, eventually. Or would she? 

The Matthews’ abbey was nearby, and Eliza sometimes walked there in her morning stroll. As soon as she left behind the tamed landscape of its grounds, still holding some shape even after years of neglect, the view of the world changed immensely. From time immemorial, that countryside had been composed of those same fields of faded green, all of them covered by marshy reeds, unkempt patches scattered here and there, surrounding little islands of sturdier land. It was difficult to imagine all that expanse submerged, but that is how it had been. The fenmen had reigned over the water, conquering it. As the land had been drained, all that had changed forever. When the land was dried and cut and divided into those disorientating fields, traversed by thin unmoving rivers, what had happened to it? It had gone to men like Sir Malcolm Matthews’s ancestors. Eliza thought she understood that this countryside was haunted, by the bitterness, by the sorrow, by the suffering that went into its making. The same men who were forced to drain it lost their way of life while they did it. They had not benefited from the change. No one had given them a piece of land to grow crops and feed their families. Was it possible that the land itself was furious, as those men might have been? 

The scientist in her was recounting the missing birds, the spring that didn’t want to come. It had begun by mere chance, this exercise in vanishings. She had failed to find the tern, at a time when it should be here. There were other oddities: lack of some insects, strange pulpy grass, and, worst of all, some places where you could hear no birds at all. Something was going on. She had seen an eerie green light moving over the marshes as well. It seemed that all living creatures were making themselves scarce, getting away from its path; as if they knew that it was an uncanny thing, something that had no business being here… But of course, she insisted to herself, these were only fancies. There must be a scientific explanation, cause and effect, a reason behind those absences, removed from those strange green shades that seemed intent on advancing inland, intent on devouring it all. 

Following it, she had got to what she thought was its source, a ruined Tudor manor house by the North Sea. It wasn’t very imposing, but almost cosy and small; nonetheless, Eliza had felt a creeping unhappiness there, as if her life had no meaning somehow, as if she had founded all her beliefs on lies until that moment. There was a white sticky substance floating around the ruin, posing on places where multicoloured fungi sprouted; she did not have a lot of mycological knowledge, and thought of Peter. She would have to ask him. If she ever were to return to the place; for what she had felt, more than anything, was as though an invisible boundary between two places was slowly lifting, and was going to trap her at the wrong side. 

She needed to breathe, and had walked around the odd structure, looking for the flat sea. The marshes, the reed swamp, the open water at the end. In a moment, a wrong vista had revealed itself. 

The tide had freakishly receded, and the water, distant in a flat, eerily never-ending expanse, was nowhere to be seen. At the end of her vision, the same soft greenish mist, but no clear line where the water and the land touched. The ground itself also seemed to have been taken back by the water, to have sucked itself up and out of place—and then she saw it. Enormous, shining black and green, traversed by unexpected orange streaks, the largest seam of umber green rhyolite, the stone that, she knew, was found in Madagascar, Oceania, the Pyrenees, Germany, Iceland, and in this particular stretch of the coast of East Anglia. A black and green sea of hardened stone, as hard indeed as a witch’s heart. 

You can find my 4* review here and the book is out now through Titan Books

Author – Lichelle Slater

Title – The Dragon Princess (Sleeping Beauty reimagined)

YA Fairytale Retelling

Cover Art by: Melissa Stevens of The Illustrated Author

Blurb:

A curse upon her head I place,
that all will see her truest face.

Princess Elisa has more than guests to worry about on her birthday. She was cursed to transform into a dragon, the faeries who vowed to save her are being murdered, and her mother has arranged her marriage to a handsome stranger from the northern kingdoms.

When her new fiance, Prince Gerard, leaves on a quest to find a cure for her, Elisa is done waiting for others to save her. 

She soon learns there’s more to her curse than she could have ever imagined. 

If Elisa accepts the dragon within, she could destroy her kingdom. But if she doesn’t, an entire race will be killed, and she’ll lose the one person she’s learned to love.

Will she save herself or will she burn everything to the ground?

Preorder at Amazon now!

About the Author!

Personal dragon trainer, lover of glitter, super nerd.

Lichelle Slater lives in Salt Lake City, Utah, with her adorable King Charles, Perseus. When she’s not working full-time as a special education preschool teacher, she’s living in the worlds she creates and shares with readers, painting, or doing any other assortment of crafting. One thing is for certain—you’ll always find a dragon in her stories.

Follow Me Here:

Sign up for my newsletter here: https://mailchi.mp/78ba88ee86a2/lichelleslater

To join my Facebook reader group, go to Lichelle’s Book Wyrms: https://www.facebook.com/groups/753608364988213/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lichelleslater_author/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/LichelleSlater

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Lichelle-Slater/e/B01MSU34EN/

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/16150296.Lichelle_Slater

Excerpts:

I had the absolute joy of meeting author McCallum J Morgan at Chapter.con last month and I’m so happy to have been invited to be part of the cover reveal launch for his new book Emergence! I was honoured to receive a copy myself which I’m hoping to start later this month so I can get a review up for its release in August.  In the meantime check out firstly the amazing cover by Black Fox Design, the blurb, then think about a pre-order, find out more about the author and enter a great giveaway to be in with the chance of winning a paperback ARC!

Emergence, Book One of Hypostasis

I await thee, Iara–the Book of Elem

A planet said to be heaven itself is about to appear in the firmament. The armies of the Empire and rebel factions prepare to stake their claims, but an ancient evil has emerged and its eyes have been fixed upon Iara for millennia.

A runaway farm boy and a cult apprentice will both find themselves drawn into the core of this conflict. Their destinies are tangled with those of the Empire, the rebellion, the Church of Elem, a menagerie of monsters, and the universe itself.

Heresy, fellowship, valor, and darkness will all emerge–and be tested to the breaking point.

Preorder now: Emergence:  https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07T1RSVX6

If the blurb has piqued your interest then read on to find out more about the fantastic characters you’ll meet on the journey!

Tesek Nyme

Tesek Nyme flees his abusive father and leaves his home world to join the Imperial Navy. Struggling with anxiety and alienation, he’s just trying to fit in and survive. War is coming and he will have to rise above it all to save the first friends he’s ever really had and meet his destiny. 

Zymar Thrassus

Zymar Thrassus is a beast trainer for the nihilistic cult of the Thrik. Enraptured by the Nihil Operas, he dreams of Geszmitt–the last day–but he will come to question all of his beliefs as events unfold and the Thrik aoign themselves with a forgotten evil and an exotic alien culture fighting for freedom from the Empire’s state religion.

Osrua Va’akoth

Osrua Va’akoth, the Imperial Astrologer, seeks to guide the Regent Princess in preserving the universe from ancient evil, but he must hide his own past and the true heresy of his quest.

About the Author:

McCallum J. Morgan writes steampunk fantasy, alternate history, and science fiction, mixing in the mythical and the macabre. He also dabbles in the dark arts of painting and costuming.

Inspired at a young age by the fantasy novels he read voraciously, he set out to become an author. After many failed attempts to write various books, he became superstitious and at last approached what he termed ‘AAAB’ or Attempt-at-a-book, so as not to jinx the thing. It worked.

His first novel was published when he was nineteen and now, at 23, he has a full trilogy of steampunk fantasy, called the Weather Casters Saga, along with the standalone horror-comedy, Ambulatory Cadavers. His writing is inspired by the fiction he loves: old myth, classic horror, and the kinds of books where the characters leap off the page. A bit eccentric, he prefers to appear at signing events and comicons in book-related costumes which he sews himself. He is also a self proclaimed amateur artist, with a predilection for watercolors and coffee…occasionally intermixed by accident.

You can find out more about McCallum J Morgan by following the links below

www.mccallumjmorgan.weebly.com

www.mhablas.blogspot.com

Also remember that giveaway I mentioned? You can enter the rafflecopter here – good luck to all that enter!

http://www.rafflecopter.com/rafl/display/67e36af28/?