New Digital Releases 2/5/10

THE BLEEDING SEASON by Greg F. Gifune

Alan, Tommy, Rick, Donald and Bernard were inseparable best friends living in the small, coastal Massachusetts town of Potter’s Cove. A circle of five, their world was simple and happy until the day Tommy was struck by a car and killed. Nothing was ever the same. They were never the same.

Years later, as the four survivors-all unhappy, unsuccessful and marking time-approach their fortieth birthdays, Bernard suddenly commits suicide.

Within weeks of Bernard’s death, one by one the mutilated bodies of murder victims are found in town, and as the three remaining friends attempt to solve the riddle of Bernard’s suicide, they come to realize that he may not have been who or what they thought he was. His entire life may have been a lie, and rather than the sad, lonely and harmless person they believed him to be, he very well may have been a savage ritual killer, a bleeder of young women who conjured evil to fulfill his own demented dreams. To find the truth not only about Bernard, but themselves, they must delve into the darkness and those who inhabit it, a darkness that cradles an unspeakable evil so terrifying it could forever trap them in the shadows of the damned and shatter the very concept of their existence.

THE BLEEDING SEASON: Evil is a state of mind.

ANCIENT EYES by David Niall Wilson

There are places in America that have been closeted away since the earliest European explorers arrived. In the mountains overlooking San Valencez, California, one such community exists. On that mountain there is a broken-down wooden church, and above its doorway, from the alcove in which they were placed generation before, two eyes stare out across the pews toward the broken and abandoned baptismal pool. They are ancient eyes, filled with malice and they draw strength from wood and stone, from the very bones of the mountain. The head they belong to is carved of wood from another place and another time, preserved and revered, then shunned and feared. Alone, in that old church, this carving has spread her roots, the power embodied in the crudely carved lines of her face deepening and shifting to match more perfectly with her new home. The carved head is just the mask of her power, and she waited for a century or more until the moment was right for another power to be recalled to the mountain.

There is another power as well, light where she is dark. His name is Abraham, and the mountain calls him home.