Virtual Book Tour & Giveaway: Dark Walker series by Shelly Campbell

DARK WALKER SERIES

by

Shelly Campbell

Speculative Fiction / Horror / Dark Sci-fi

Publisher: Eerie River Publishing

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SYNOPSES:

When we were children, they told us monsters weren't real. They were dead wrong.

 

It’s just a closet door with a skeleton key, but when David opens it, he unlocks a gateway to a sinister world that’s bent on destroying everything and everyone he loves. Some doors are better left closed.

 

Embark on a thrilling journey with the Dark Walker Series, and be transported into an interdimensional tale of monsters, lies and self-discovery. Where the terror of darkness is real and the line between ally and enemy is as thin as a blade.

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PRAISE FOR GULF:

 

"Equal parts coming of age story and otherworldly horror, Gulf probes the depths of loneliness, loss of identity and childhood trauma. It is a true treat for fans of the genre and had me clutched in its razor-clawed hands from the first word to the last.” 

-C.M. Forest author of Infested

Book One:

Seventeen-year-old David is fading from his world, like a Polaroid picture in reverse. He longs to feel connected to something bigger.
 
When his brothers discover the new extension at the rental cottage comes with a locked door, David finds the key first. Expecting to claim a bedroom, he opens a dimensional gateway instead, exploring abandoned versions of his world in different timelines, 1960s muscle cars alternating with crumbling cottages.
 
Except now the dimensional bridge won’t close, and something hungry claws the door at night. David scours for clues to break the bridge, but each trip to the other side makes him fade more on his. Even if he succeeds, he risks severing his connection to his own world, and dying on the wrong side, forgotten.

Book Two:

There are doors that open to other worlds, but it’s no fairytale on the other side.

 

I thought otherworldly monsters bent on devouring my whole world starting with my family trumped everything. Turns out, I was wrong. My world's only one of thousands facing annihilation from the maneaters that tried to eat me alive. Charlie saved me, rolled into my life on a motorcycle, and rescued me.

 

Problem is, I’m the Embassy’s property now. They’re the interdimensional agency tasked with stemming the flow of ravenous aliens into our universe, but they seem more interested in studying me. I crashed a gateway in a way they’ve never seen. The Embassy wants to replicate that. I think they want to use me as a war weapon.

 

If I don’t convince Charlie to help me escape, I’ll be an Embassy science experiment for the rest of my short life, or worse, eternally trapped in the dark hell that fills the spaces between worlds.

READ AN EXCERPT:

Something that sounds like a dog scrabbling across hardwood jolts me awake. I focus on a low wooden ceiling and struggle to place my surroundings. My legs tingle under a heavy weight, and when I push away what I assume is a blanket, the dictionary slides off my knees and falls to the floor with a thud. The busy scratching intensifies, reminds me of mice running through our hollow walls back home, or cockroaches.

 

That sounds bigger than cockroaches. I frown.“Shit!” I whisper, scrambling to the edge of the loft, and blinking into the darkness below.

 

James is standing in front of the couch. A wedge of pale moonlight from the kitchen window ribbons across his back, and his shoulders shudder. He’s shivering. A moving shadow ahead of him catches my gaze. It’s a black hand extending under the door, elongated fingers splayed, claws scrabbling for purchase on the worn planks as it reaches for James’s ankle.

 

“James!” I yelp.

 

He shuffles closer to the five-panel, oblivious to my call, but the maneater hears it and rattles the door violently.

 

“James, stop!” I plunge down the ladder and my feet hit the floor so hard my ankles twinge. Spinning, I grip the couch as I round it, grasping for my brother’s shoulder. I miss, barely raking his back as he shuffles ahead with his hand reaching for the crystal doorknob glinting in the moonlight. “James!”

 

The black questing hand snags around his ankle and yanks hard.

 

James’s chin snaps against his chest as the rest of him rag-dolls backward. A thick smack reverberates through the floor as his head ricochets off hardwood.

 

I scream and jump over him.

 

The claw twists James’s foot sideways and jerks back, mashing my brother’s heel against the bottom of the shuddering door, deaf to his waking, harrowing wail.

 

Blood trickles down his foot.

GUEST POST:

Please welcome Shelly Campbell, the author of the Dark Walker series to the blog today.

In the course of writing our books, there is always a fascinating piece of research that we stumble on and it may, or may not make it into our stories. Really good research should, of course, never be intrusive so here is your opportunity to let that little piece of trivia or major research point have its moment in the sun. For your post, it would be wonderful if you could share a “Fun Fact”.

Thanks so much for having me as a guest. What a fantastic topic! What writer hasn’t lost hours—or days—going down a rabbit hole of research that started with one niggling question? And once you get excited about it, you want to share everything you’ve learned! But fiction isn’t a university dissertation. Your readers don’t want an encyclopaedia—well, maybe a couple of them do—the rest, they came to be entertained, so it’s our job as writers to use our research to paint subtle strokes that reinforce our world-building, not info-dumps that drag our audience out of the story.

For Breach, book 2 of the Dark Walker series, my Achilles heel of research was time travel, specifically, time distortion caused by near light-speed travel. I’m not well-studied on the topic. Not. At. All. It felt really intimidating for me to tackle a book that involved time travel aspects when I didn’t know a lot about the subject. I was certain I would confuse myself knotting up timelines. Time travel itself is a confusing beast.

Quite simply, I didn’t think I was smart enough to tackle the subject with any sort of authority. I’m still not. But Lord, did I go down a rabbit hole, folks.

I read articles on Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and time dilation—the phenomenon where if someone is standing still and, relative to them, someone else is moving at near light speed, time passes noticeably slower for the person going fast, relative to the person who’s not moving.

My main character David finds out that his universe is a tree that has tens-of-thousands of branching dimensions. When the big bang happened, dimensions accelerated away from the trunk and, compared to it, they’re moving away from it at near light speed. A few seconds in a dimension really high up the tree translates to much longer down in the trunk. Society has figured out how to hop between dimensional twigs using bridges, but they experience time dilation because of the differences in relative speed between their departure and arrival worlds.

Incidentally, the movie Interstellar does a great—if greatly exaggerated—job of showing the effects of time dilation effect caused by a nearby black hole.

I went so far as to find an online time dilation calculator and figure out what speed each dimension in David’s universe is moving at, and how much time dilation travellers would experience coming back from those worlds down to the trunk.

I even sketched out a rough little branching chart.

When Cory and David have a chat about time dilation, and he jots down a visual to explain it, I’ve included my illustration in the book. The acceleration of the worlds and the extent of time dilation my characters experience when they bridge worlds was all based on that time dilation formula calculator.

But readers don’t need to know all that when they’re deep into the story of Breach. They just need a short conversation between characters as to why time is all messed up, and maybe a little chart (because it was fun to draw). They just need the science to feel sound.

Did my research do that? Did it actually make my story better? I suppose that’s for my audience to decide. It did help me puzzle out some of the dilemmas I put David into, and it was fun. Sometimes we research for the pure fun of it, to satisfy a curiosity itch. Even if it doesn’t make it into your story, it still feeds your imagination, right? And that’s the most important part. Keep feeding those imaginations!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

At a young age, Shelly Campbell wanted to be an air show pilot or a pirate, possibly a dragon and definitely a writer and artist. She’s piloted a Cessna 172 through spins and stalls, and sailed up the east coast on a tall ship barque—mostly without projectile vomiting. In the end, Shelly found writing and drawing dragons to be so much easier on the stomach. Shelly writes speculative fiction ranging from grimdark fantasy, to sci-fi and horror. She’d love to hear from you.

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