Chapter One

Decrepit crimson skies howl with nature’s careless whisper, twisting and slithering throughout the rattle of skeletal limbs. These are the somber days of mysticism and morbidity, where inspiration comes in the shape of environmental art and respect. The months that follow this are a marriage of creativity thinking and artistic merit, drowned in various warm colors that die swiftly into something depressing and macabre, but holds the incognito of twisted beauty.

This is Harland Francis’ favorite time of the year, wallowing in the strange majesty of cool, ominous nights and the attractive depression of grey, insipid days; aroused by the fragrance of vibrant, mourning leaves and almost constant rain. This was a bipolar season and the incoherent, yet hypocritical redundancy left him in awe at the end of a hot and humid Summer. Yeah, Summer is always nice- that clichéd advertisement we all claim of its beauty- even through the heat can be overbearing and arrogant sometimes, but there is a certain storybook mystery about Fall, and even some elements of Winter.

This is inspiration for his passion as a horror writer; a love he found in the midst of high school those dreamy ten years ago. It was like a switch turning on his brain and he was off like a round from a rifle. His first novel was written at the ripe age of twenty-one; a tale of human experiences based around a coastal small town lost in the days of the Salem Witch Trials, an immature and ignorant time in the American annals. Needless to say, it went well over fans of historical and character horror. And it wasn’t long until the coat tails of fortune and admiration drug him into a career; of course, it didn’t come without some skepticism from his front, wondering and worrying about the message and if it would be received by the populace. The vice of all adolescent writers and authors. You think your book won’t be as good as you see fit, so you result to finding all the things wrong with it. It’s an aggravating and argumentative task, writing. It sometimes brings out the best and worse in people, a strategic embattlement of art prose.

He was on his second novel, sitting in the back of his two story farmhouse in his study, nestled between a dark oak computer desk, illuminated by a slender lamp and laptop computer, and a high window full of small glass panels that reveal a dull breathtaking visage of flat, green land spilling out toward a photographic enticement of faded mountains and surrounded by tall trees that pan from skeletal remains on their last few trees and lush pines.

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Author guidance for This story

Harland Francis has created a novel that took the world by surprise, and through those fumes of success he yearns to create another....

updated Mar 15 '11 by 123Lit