In the first chapter of my horror novel, CADEN IS COMING: A SOUTHERN VAMPIRE EPIC, a thief named Hal Duckett, and his accomplice, Larry Jones, have come to rob a safe at an isolated mansion in the South Georgia countryside. They are abetted by Burnett Lowe, the caretaker of the estate, who assures them that the owner is nowhere about the place, but that they must be finished with their business and be gone before sundown. Hal is suspicious of Lowe, sensing that the man is hiding something. Once the safe is cracked, the three of them split up the money found inside, but Lowe insists on taking the large ancient looking leather bound book that is also among the safe’s contents. Sensing that the book might be a rare edition, and worth more than the cash, Hal insists on having a look at what is between the covers for himself.

An excerpt from CADEN IS COMING:

“Don’t read any of it out loud,” Lowe managed to gasp out. “For God’s sake listen to me on this.”

Hal was about to slam the book shut and give up, he even considered tossing the damn thing back to Lowe in frustration when he thumbed over to the middle of the volume and to his relief, discovered the handwriting had turned to English. It followed the same form as before, a few paragraphs of text, then row after row of names, written three across, covering the surface of each page. Hal skimmed a few sentences, hoping to catch the gist of it.

He silently read down half a page before stopping and calling over to Larry, “Listen to this, it’ll blow your mind.”

“Noooo!” Lowe wailed. “I’m beggin’ you.”

Hal paid him no mind and proceeded to read aloud from the book. “A Maker must never tolerate a brazen and deliberate insult or lack of due respect, for that reason I decided to make an example of Mayland Bantree and his tribe of harlots. In the hour before sunrise, I went alone to the ruin of his ancestor’s once great plantation and found him feeding and fornicating with members of what he called his ‘Arab Harem.’ Too besotted to resist me, I drug the wretch from his four-poster bed and nailed him upside down to his barn wall with my bare hands. Thereupon I slit open his throat, so that the blood of the murdered Angel, my wasted gift to him, would drain out upon the red Georgia dirt. There I left him, crucified in the manner of St. Peter, for the sun to finish my work My final act was to seal up the ‘harem’ inside the Bantree house and set the place afire, the despicable whores beseeched me for mercy, but such low living mortal vermin were beneath such consideration. Their screams as the fire took them did no more to prick my conscious than the mewling of a cellar rat caught under my boot. It is hard, but it is a right and necessary thing done to restore order to my clan.”

“Whoa,” Larry said when Hal finished. “That sounds hard-core; those old Ku-Klux guys didn’t mess around.”

“I don’t think he was talking about the fellows in the white sheets,” Hal said. Clan is spelled with a ‘c’ and the people you’re talking about liked to have neck-tie parties; doing as the Romans did was really not their style.” A shiver ran through Hal and it took a minute for him to comprehend how freaked out reading the passage had made him feel. He had seen some hard shit in his line of work, but the calmness with which the writer had put to paper the atrocities he committed was something beyond his experience. The ink is faded to brown, but I bet it was bright red on the day this page was written. Bright scarlet ink. For a moment Hal Duckett was seized with the urge to let the book in his hands drop to the floor and flee this great brick house in the country, to walk all the way back to Atlanta, if necessary, to put one foot in front of the other and not look back.

“Anything more like that in there?” Larry’s question broke Hal’s train of thought and he was back to being the best B&E man in the greater metropolitan Atlanta area again.

“Nothing for a few pages but a list of names, could be a register of slaves.”

“It’s a list of the damned.” Burnett Lowe was staring straight ahead at something only he could see, “the joyful and happily damned.”


Follow the link below to find out what happens to Hal and Larry, and Burnett too. Not only them, but everyone else who comes into contact with a certain book filled with the names of the “joyful and happily damned.”

Start reading CADEN IS COMING: A SOUTHERN VAMPIRE EPIC on Wattpad at: https://w.tt/3ESmQXK