The Lake Town: A Novel

My new novel is almost here, so here is your first look! Enjoy!

There had never been anything special about the town of Lake DeLayne. It was just one of a number of small, Midwestern lake towns with one high school, a police force of five, and kids who get their excitement drag racing past cornfields and grain silos beyond the town limits.

Quiet, peaceful, and relatively crime free, it has always been considered a good place to live, raise a family, and retire. No one suspected that it would quickly become the center of terror and death.

It begins on a cool March night when an object comes hurtling out of the sky without warning, crashing into the center of the lake. The impact creates a sudden tidal wave that slams into homes, businesses, and people. When everything settles it leaves seven dead and a town full of stunned and grieving citizens. They thought that night was the worse their town had to face. They were wrong.

What was thought to be a simple meteorite turns out to be something far worse, something that can turn simple law-abiding citizens into emotionless killers—but killers with a sinister purpose. Now several people must band together to stop them, including Will Benton, an Iraq War veteran and single father, his teenage son Nick, Amanda, a girl fighting her own personal demons, and her younger brother Teddy, who may know more about what’s happening than anyone, though communicating with him is almost impossible. If they succeed they may not only save their town but they may save the entire planet.

The Lake Town is a modern horror novel of suspense and a frightening tale of survival.

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EXCERPT:

PART ONE

THE BIG WAVE

Chapter 1

     Twelve minutes till the event.

     In twelve minutes Will Benton will be one of the few residents of the lake town with a clear view of the impact. Standing on the second floor balcony of the Lakeview Motel dressed in a thin T-shirt and faded Levis, no socks or shoes despite the frosty temps—Hell, he’s lucky he had his pants on!—just two blocks from the lake, the motel resting on a ridge allowing Will to see over the shops along Balford Street below and Lakeside Park another block beyond.

     In twelve minutes Raymond Heller will just be finishing his speech to friends and supporters while Tom Cawley, Lake DeLayne’s long-serving Chief of Police, will be trying to coax a naked man out of a tree in Lakeside Park. Nick Benton, Will’s teenage son, will view the event from the back of Chief Cawley’s police car. His maternal grandfather, Orvis DeLayne, will have twelve minutes left of life while Amanda Hynes, a classmate of Nick’s, will begin to tie a sheet around her neck, tie it to the smooth white wooden clothes bar in her closet, and contemplate oblivion.

     All of the residents of Lake DeLayne will be going about their lives unaware that in twelve minutes their lives will never be the same. The impact will be at ten-seventeen in the p.m. Many of the residents are retired and will have just finished watching an NCIS rerun before turning off the TV and shuffling off to the bathroom to brush their teeth, both real and false, gargle, piss, then pop an assortment of life-extending candy-colored meds before finally slipping into bed.

     But it being a Saturday night, most of the residents south of age sixty will be out enjoying the evening, the night just kicking into gear when the whole shebang comes smashing down on them. Over at the Brickwylder’s house, one of the less ostentatious of the lake houses (“Moneyfuck Lookatme Shacks” Orvis DeLayne called them), seven excited boys will be hopping around down in the basement for a sleepover to celebrate Billy Brickwylder’s tenth birthday. In one of the many miracles attributed to that night, none of the boys would die—the worse being Ricky Jansen suffering a broken arm—despite the massive rush of water that will come down into the basement.

     Miracles often happen when they are least expected.