Like all small rural towns, Canaan, West Virginia has its secrets: lies, infidelities, and even murder are kept hidden in the minds of the residents there. But there is one secret they will go to any lengths to protect.
A little girl named Gabrielle, believed to be an angel, has been kept chained in the church basement for over a century now, prisoner of an ancient pact. Unaging and unearthly beautiful, Gabrielle has the power to heal.
A madman pursues outsiders Adam and Holly Mansfield to Canaan, intent on kidnapping their daughter. Once there they discover there is one other secret in Canaan.
Chained deep in the heart of the mountain is another being, a demon called Scratch. If Gabrielle is freed, Scratch will be as well, and his vengeance and evil will consume the town.
*****
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*****
Reviews:
Good solid entry into the horror/fantasy arena, December 14, 2011
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Scratch (Kindle Edition)
Scratch is my first foray into Amazon's program in self-publishing. I bought it on the recommendation of a friend who knows I like this kind of fiction (horror/fantasy) and because the beginning takes place in a location I'm well familiar with: Pittsburgh Pa, specifically Oakland, the area containing University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon. Anyone who has ever gone to school here will get a kick out of a VERY accurate footchase from Craig St past the Cathedral of Learning and Carnegie library, and into Schenley Park!Scratch is a story of a town (Canaan, West Virginia...that one appears to be a fiction, if Google Maps is correct) that is hiding a secret (two actually). It seems some of their ancestors bound a healing angel Gabrielle(and her not so healing brother, Scratch) a century ago. They've been using her to heal their nicks and bruises over the years. It seems a town with a secret like this is prone to some pretty decent nicks and bruises, and would do anything to keep their secret.
The book moves along briskly, but gets bogged down a bit in some dream sequences that I personally am never fond of. The characters are an interesting mix. My one complaint is that I wished that a little more time were spent fleshing them out a bit more. It can be a trick to make "bad guys" sympathetic and vice versa, but I think it was pulled off here.
By book's end, there's a hint of what Gabrielle and Scratch's nature is, and I would like to see a little more. Maybe a sequel.
I'll definitely give Mr Wise's other books a whirl (In fact, the price alone got me to send a digital copy to my friend, another ex-Pittsburgher living in LA)
Terrific book!,
By
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Scratch (Kindle Edition)
I found this book to be well written, with well defined, intriguing characters and a unique premise. Mr. Wise does a great job of keeping the story moving at a good clip, juggling various story lines, and making the fantastic seem entirely plausible.The book is very cinematic in its presentation, and played out in my mind's eye as a gripping film. This was a fun, engaging read, and I'm looking forward to lots more from this author, who reminds me of a young Stephen King. Don't mistake this analogy - Mr. Wise isn't a match (yet) for Mr. King in his prime, but he shows great promise and deals with similar themes. |
*****
As I said in a previous post, the novel I now call Scratch began it's life as a short story set in the fanfic Marvel superhero universe of The Guardians. In that story two of my characters, Auracle and Totem, ended up in a small rural community while attempting to rescue Totem's daughter from a superpowered madman. There, they encountered a young mutant girl with wings and the power to heal. This girl was being held hostage in the basement of a church because the small community there believed she was an angel and it was their duty to “protect” her from the rest of the world, while using her powers for their own benefit, of course.
At some point, in the aftermath of King of Summer, when I was casting about for a new idea for a second novel I realized that there was a central concept in this short story that I could mine for a larger project. It wasn't difficult to strip out all of the references to the Marvel Universe and superpowers and recast those abilities in supernatural terms.
At this point I should say that there will probably be SPOILERS from here on. I don't plan on giving away major plot points, but still... you might want to read the book first (yeah... that's a shameless plug).
Auracle and Totem became Adam and Holly Mansfield. The superpowered madman became Billy Haught, the non-powered but nonetheless mad father of Holly's daughter Michaela.
I don't really know how to talk about the process of developing a novel in my head. Even if this experience wasn't several years old at this point I'm not sure if I could recreate all of the pieces. Like King of Summer, I didn't really make a lot of notes. I created a situation and threw my characters into it and then wrote to see what would happen.
Scratch is set in the same universe as King of Summer. Though there is no overlap of characters the small town of Appleton appears in both (Appleton has become for me what Castle Rock and Derry are for Stephen King... I think we'll go back there frequently in my work).
A lot things happen when I start thinking about my characters and their relationships. Connections are made, new insights develop, they start saying and doing things I didn't intend. None of them are based specifically on anyone but are amalgamations and observations of the world I've come to know. None of them are meant to be overtly me, but I'm pretty aware of the parts of me that do go into some of them. The scene early in the book when Adam “quits” his job is a hyperbolic version of something that actually happened to me when I walked away from my professional career in psychology. His struggles with depression and how to come to terms with his creativity are also exaggerated fictionalized accounts of some of my own struggles.
I had been reading a lot about shamanism at the time, and spirit animals, but I really had no idea the bear was going to show up in the story until it did. The first dream Adam has involving a bear is one I actually had. It started me on a symbolic journey of self-discovery so I thought it appropriate to send Adam on one as well. His was different than mine, but this piece of unexpected synchronicity opened the story in directions I hadn't planned.
Scratch is probably the darkest and most violent of the books I've written. I'm not sure where this comes from. In general I'm known as a pretty happy-go-lucky guy with distinct pacifist tendencies (the last physical altercation I was ever in was 5th grade, and that girl beat the crap out of me). But I am drawn to the concept of the darkness of the human soul. While I have read a lot of Horror novels I'm not really a fan of the hack and slash, splatter and gore school. However, I also don't believe violence should be whitewashed. If it appears in a story there should consequences. I think it should be painful and ugly, not glamorous.
The themes of this story developed around the two supernatural characters introduced in the prologue, Gabrielle and Scratch. There's a Tom Waits lyric that goes, “If I exorcise my devils, Well my angels may leave too.” This was not a conscious inspiration when writing Scratch, but it certainly sums it up. The idea of opposites, ups and downs, light and dark, and how they are each defined by the other all came into play while I was writing. Trying to hide our dark side can only lead to it getting stronger. Too often we chain up our better natures and that too can lead to a perversion of them.
And I'm finding writing about Scratch to be more difficult than writing it was. Hopefully you will discover everything I have to say, and more, from the book itself.
