Blurb
Skate
punks, kleptomaniacs, clairvoyant visions and reincarnation...
...THE
SHEPHERD is unlike any other Young Adult novel you have ever read.
Mike Evans here. Sixteen year old skate punk squatting in a white-trash trailer park with my loser drunk Dad. Seems I lost most of my friends when Dad lost our home in foreclosure. Only Anita stuck by me. Worse, I keep having strange clairvoyant visions of things that always come true.
Then I almost ran over Nadia in my Geo. A passing truck finished the job – left a crumpled heap of skin and bone on the road. I fixed her. Me.
Now this fourteen year old girl won’t leave me alone. I sorta let her sneak in my window when she needs a place to crash.
I have a double life: daytime at school, Anita, skating, and then my nights with Nadia. She's my secret friend, gives me money and listens to my problems when nobody else will.
My world is spinning out of control. Old friends have turned enemy, my grisly visions of death won’t quit, and Anita’s intentions make my head spin. Even with all that, I’ve got bigger stuff to worry about.
Nadia’s hiding something.
Interview
- Tell us 5 things that make you happy
Cocoa mixed with coffee,
Paranormal/horror with a good splash of sex and violence, freshly diced salsa,
roller coasters, and the smiles of my wife and children
- What makes your perfect man,
perfect? What do you look for in a hero?
I don’t have any perfect men in my
novels, because they don’t exist in reality.
Fiction/art imitates life, and perfection is rarely if ever found in the
real world.
My heroes are always flawed in one way
or another, often reluctant, and usually remorseful of the violence that comes
from being a hero. Occasionally they
enjoy the violence a little too much, those characters that walk the line
between heroism and villainy.
I find it all too easy to write
villains, it’s the heroes I struggle with.
- What qualities make up your least
favourite heroine?
It’s the self-righteous judgmental
ladies who tend to be the most irritating.
Those women who see everything as black and white drive me nuts. The world is mired in shades of grey and
there is rarely anything or anyone who is all bad or all good.
- Do you have any quirks? When
writing, or otherwise?
No matter what I do, I can’t seem to
escape my tendency to write with intense violence and steamy sex. Even in Young Adult fiction, I had to
struggle to tone down the intensity. I
did eventually find a balance. My teens
are gritty, true-to-life, the way teens really are, in all their obnoxious
glory.
- Do you have any hobbies that you
take part in when you aren’t writing?
Roller coasters, paranormal films,
paranormal fiction novels, and I cook some of the best tacos and Spanish rice
you ever tasted.
- What do you like to read?
My first love was horror, then I
gravitated towards science fiction. As
the years passed, I realized I had begun to focus on dark paranormal novels
with supernatural creatures such as vampires and weres. Then I picked up a book by Laurell K.
Hamilton, one of the Anita Baker Vampire Hunter series, and that blasted open a
whole new world of sexy, steamy dark fiction.
Now, it’s my guilty pleasure to both read and write these kinds of
novels: dark, sexy, and violent, almost horror-thriller, but with heavy
flavours of romance.
- If you had to pick one of your
characters to survive a zombie apocalypse with, who would it be and why?
In the Nightlife Series (very adult
fiction), I would choose Michelle de Mornac, a French vampire femme
fatale. She survived the battlefields of
WWII France, cutting through Germans like a starving woman at a banquet. In dealing with Michelle you’re never quite
sure if she wants bite you, have sex with you, or tear out your entrails and
play in them. She’s a dark, sensual
creature that I find fascinating to write, and I truly enjoy exploring the
depths of her depravity. Michelle is the
ideal companion to take down a pack of zombies and then keep you warm through
the rest of the night.
- Tell us a bit about how your book came about.
THE SHEPHERD was inspired by a number
of events in my teenage years, and many of the vampire films and novels I have enjoyed
through the years. You will find a touch
of Fright Night, a bit of Let The Right One In, and a dash of True Blood. Writing this novel was like a trip down
memory lane, reliving some of the less noble moments of my own teenage
years. I was that kid you warned your
daughters to stay away from. Would you
believe I actually had a Joe Dirt mullet in high school?
- Which of the seven deadly sins are
you most partial to? Which do you indulge in the most?
Without a shadow of doubt, I will roast
in the Lake of Fire for Lust. On the
scale of sins, Lust outweighs them all by several tons.
- Who is the person who most inspired
you? Either in your life, or writing?
I take inspiration from so many
places. But, to point out authors whose
writings I feel directly inspired me, I have to say Stephen King, Robert R
McCammon, Clive Barker, Robert Heinlein, Dean Koontz, and the wonderfully
perverse Laurell K. Hamilton.
Though my own writing is far more
perverse than the standard horror novels, I cut my teeth on horror, and it’s in
my bloodstream, and in every book I write there will always be gritty moments
of thriller intensity.
- Do you have a favourite quote?
I have many faves, but this is one of
the best: “A man sees in the world what
he carries in his heart.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust:
First Part
- Can you tell us a little about your
latest project?
I published THE SHEPHERD in October,
and it’s actually a story whose timeline takes place in September and October,
the perfect Halloween story.
This is a tale of a lost young man,
Mike Evans, trying to find his way through high school and life. He’s a skater, antisocial, and not doing so
hot with the opposite sex. He pines
after the one that got away, an ex-girlfriend who wants nothing to do with
him. He’s too young and dumb to see his
best friend Anita is right there, waiting for him to notice her as a woman.
And then there’s Nadia, a girl who is
so much more than she appears. Nadia
brightens Mike’s nights and darkens his days with the dangers of her obsessive
fixation on him.
Mike’s grisly clairvoyant visions of
death and dismemberment are not helping the situation.
Since his alcoholic father is never
there when he needs him, and his mother died at birth, Mike’s on his own.
Teens in THE SHEPHERD inhabit a dark,
gritty nightlife that their parents are clueless to manage.
- Last but not least, if you could be
anyone else in the world, who would it be, and why?
I would love to be that guy who won the 300 million dollar Powerball and
disappeared to travel the world on a permanent vacation. But even so, I would still write and publish
my macabre, perverse fiction. I enjoy it
too much to ever quit.
Thank you for talking to me and letting us all know a bit more about you!
Excerpt
Chapter 1
Thursday, September 9th, 5:15 p.m.
Shit happens, life happens, but
for some reason it happens to me a lot.
I mean, look at Justin
Shelby. I’m sitting here in my car, in
the McDonald’s drive through, and what is he doing? He’s climbing up the side of the damn
playcenter. Probably faded on
prescription pills he stole from his mom.
This guy is begging for life to hit him upside the head. But it never does.
And then there’s his buddy, Tommy
Schroeder, goading him on.
“Do it man! You’re almost there!”
Justin skated religiously, a
regular at the downtown Moses Lake skatepark across from the Aquatic Center. Like most of us skaters, he was thin,
moderately athletic, and had a strong sense of balance from endless hours
busting his ass on the concrete.
Climbing the playcenter wasn’t any more dangerous than the skate tricks
we recorded and posted to YouTube.
Justin’s momentum came to an abrupt halt as he hit the top of the fence ass first.
“Oh my god this is insane!”
I saved the ninety-three second
video clip of Justin on my smart phone and posted it directly to my Facebook timeline. I had a momentary twinge of conscience. I mean, he was still crying, and Tommy was
trying to climb the fence to help him.
It looked really painful.
* * * *
About the Author
Travis Luedke is a
husband, father, and author of Urban Fantasy Thriller, Paranormal Romance,
Contemporary Fantasy, Young Adult Fiction, and Sci-fi. He is currently catching
a 3rd degree sunburn in San Antonio, Texas, and loving every minute of it.
As the author of
the Nightlife Series novels, Travis lives very vicariously through his
writings. He invites you to enjoy his macabre flights of fancy, but be warned: The Nightlife Series is violent, sexy, and
occasionally violently sexy.
Email -
twluedke@gmail.com
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