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Author Spotlight: Roma Gray’s Gray Shadows Under a Harvest Moon

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One of the most difficult tasks for a new author is introducing their work to the reader.  For most, it’s a spin of the roulette wheel.  The book is published and you work with your publicist and publisher to run the best campaign possible to get people to crack open the covers or download onto their devices to read.  Generally, today, this means social marketing campaigns, interviews on various websites, and some even get video ads placed on YouTube.  There are authors out there who come up with much more creative ways of getting the word out, and Roma Gray is one of those authors.

In her anthology, Gray Shadows Under a Harvest Moon: Six Trick or Treat Thrillers, Ms. Gray has done something I have never seen before.  Quite simply, she gives you six short stories that introduce her ideas for brand new novels that will be headed to retailers near you, and then she takes it one step further.  In the second half of the anthology, Ms. Gray gives information about what will be coming in these novels by “interviewing” one or two of the characters from each story.  It’s a genius idea because you can introduce your brand of fiction to the public and generate interest for more.

So, what is Ms. Gray’s brand of fiction and who is her target audience?  As I finished up reading her book, I asked her that question, myself.  She responded, “My target audience is adult and young adult. The idea being that most of the Halloween-style books out there are aimed at children, but teens and adults like Halloween as well (it doesn’t have to be just for kids.) On the other end of the spectrum, many of us don’t like the hard core horror books, either. It’s seems to me that there is a huge gap between those two extremes and I’m trying to fill that gap.”

After reading her book, I can tell you that she hit her mark.  Her stories boast original ideas that are light-hearted while still boasting a host of standard horror creatures:  zombies, vampires, dark magic practitioners, and even sasquatch.  That’s right, guys, Bigfoot makes an appearance in a tale called “The Invisible Carrier” concerning an epidemic in the Pacific Northwest and the sasquatch is the outbreak monkey, carrying the disease from one small town to the next.

I have to be honest here.  Ms. Gray’s brand of fiction does not suit me.  The tone of the stories and the characters seem like fodder for a slew of movies on the Syfy network.  There is a time and a place and even a network for this type of story, but it just isn’t my cup of tea.  I do like the darker tales and I like my monsters a bit more monstrous. One story that did stick out for me, however.  In “Summer Vacation”, we are introduced to a young man named Sean who is spending the summer with his grandmother.  He is a bit of a recluse and has developed, at first as a joke to drive his mother crazy, an interest in dark magic.  When Sean begins to realize that his spells are actually working and that from across the country he has somehow set fire to his bed at home and made the water in his parent’s home run red as blood, he begins to get nervous.  Once again, the tone of the story is not my taste, but it would be one that I would sit down and read to find out what happens in the end.

I applaud Ms. Gray’s presenting a truly polished work.  It is difficult to find digitally published work that is edited this well, even among established authors like King and Rice.  It is something that just isn’t given as much time as it should be anymore.

So, to pull this all together, if you’re the kind of horror reader who enjoys your entertainment a bit on the lighter side, this is the book for you and I would urge you to get a copy of Ms. Gray’s anthology today.  You can follow the link here to Amazon and score it for only $2.99!

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‘Evil Dead’ Film Franchise Getting TWO New Installments

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It was a risk for Fede Alvarez to reboot Sam Raimi’s horror classic The Evil Dead in 2013, but that risk paid off and so did its spiritual sequel Evil Dead Rise in 2023. Now Deadline is reporting that the series is getting, not one, but two fresh entries.

We already knew about the Sébastien Vaniček upcoming film that delves into the Deadite universe and should be a proper sequel to the latest film, but we are broadsided that Francis Galluppi and Ghost House Pictures are doing a one-off project set in Raimi’s universe based off of an idea that Galluppi pitched to Raimi himself. That concept is being kept under wraps.

Evil Dead Rise

“Francis Galluppi is a storyteller who knows when to keep us waiting in simmering tension and when to hit us with explosive violence,” Raimi told Deadline. “He is a director that shows uncommon control in his feature debut.”

That feature is titled The Last Stop In Yuma County which will release theatrically in the United States on May 4. It follows a traveling salesman, “stranded at a rural Arizona rest stop,” and “is thrust into a dire hostage situation by the arrival of two bank robbers with no qualms about using cruelty-or cold, hard steel-to protect their bloodstained fortune.”

Galluppi is an award-winning sci-fi/horror shorts director whose acclaimed works include High Desert Hell and The Gemini Project. You can view the full edit of High Desert Hell and the teaser for Gemini below:

High Desert Hell
The Gemini Project

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‘Invisible Man 2’ Is “Closer Than Its Ever Been” to Happening

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Elisabeth Moss in a very well-thought-out statement said in an interview for Happy Sad Confused that even though there have been some logistical issues for doing Invisible Man 2 there is hope on the horizon.

Podcast host Josh Horowitz asked about the follow-up and if Moss and director Leigh Whannell were any closer to cracking a solution to getting it made. “We are closer than we have ever been to cracking it,” said Moss with a huge grin. You can see her reaction at the 35:52 mark in the below video.

Happy Sad Confused

Whannell is currently in New Zealand filming another monster movie for Universal, Wolf Man, which might be the spark that ignites Universal’s troubled Dark Universe concept which hasn’t gained any momentum since Tom Cruise’s failed attempt at resurrecting The Mummy.

Also, in the podcast video, Moss says she is not in the Wolf Man film so any speculation that it’s a crossover project is left in the air.

Meanwhile, Universal Studios is in the middle of constructing a year-round haunt house in Las Vegas which will showcase some of their classic cinematic monsters. Depending on attendance, this could be the boost the studio needs to get audiences interested in their creature IPs once more and to get more films made based on them.

The Las Vegas project is set to open in 2025, coinciding with their new proper theme park in Orlando called Epic Universe.

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Jake Gyllenhaal’s Thriller ‘Presumed Innocent’ Series Gets Early Release Date

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Jake gyllenhaal presumed innocent

Jake Gyllenhaal’s limited series Presumed Innocent is dropping on AppleTV+ on June 12 instead of June 14 as originally planned. The star, whose Road House reboot has brought mixed reviews on Amazon Prime, is embracing the small screen for the first time since his appearance on Homicide: Life on the Street in 1994.

Jake Gyllenhaal’s in ‘Presumed Innocent’

Presumed Innocent is being produced by David E. Kelley, J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot, and Warner Bros. It is an adaptation of Scott Turow’s 1990 film in which Harrison Ford plays a lawyer doing double duty as an investigator looking for the murderer of his colleague.

These types of sexy thrillers were popular in the ’90s and usually contained twist endings. Here’s the trailer for the original:

According to Deadline, Presumed Innocent doesn’t stray far from the source material: “…the Presumed Innocent series will explore obsession, sex, politics and the power and limits of love as the accused fights to hold his family and marriage together.”

Up next for Gyllenhaal is the Guy Ritchie action movie titled In the Grey scheduled for release in January 2025.

Presumed Innocent is an eight-episode limited series set to stream on AppleTV+ starting June 12.

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