Day Two in the Life of Paul

YES, it is Day 2 of my part in Richard Long’s Blog Tour of The Book of Paul.

It is Day 2 and I already have to apologise to yesterday’s readers for misleading you about your opportunity of winning all these fabulous prizes. It seems you all have the opportunity to win as you will discover when you read on.

After yesterday’s goof, I probably did not endear myself to blog tour organizer , Novel Publicity who kindly let me have a go, as we love to say in Australia.

At this point I had better show my tour badge to authenticate I am really part of this great enterprise and not some crazed troll.

I thought I would play safe today and post one of the files tour organiser, Novel Publicity, sent me. It is an excerpt from the novel.

Unfortunately, I saw it contained these HTML commands. I said to myself “Bernie, WTF are you supposed to do with those?” I am a simple blogger. I took them out and the end product looks alright to me, though I am known to be very forgiving of myself.

In case I have stuffed up again, I have value-added a mini-review of the excerpt and a song to celebrate today’s blog.

Well let’s get stuck in and see what we think.

Cheers,

Bernie

Please enjoy this excerpt from The Book of Paul a nail-biting supernatural thriller by Richard Long. Then read on to learn how you can win huge prizes as part of this blog tour, including a Kindle Fire, $300 in Amazon gift cards, 5 autographed copies of the book, and a look into your future through a free tarot reading performed by the author.

Monsters:  An Excerpt from The Book of Paul

You tell your children not to be afraid. You tell them everything will be all right. You tell them Mommy and Daddy will always be there. You tell them lies.

Paul looked out the filthy window and watched the little girl playing in the filthier street below. Hopscotch. He didn’t think kids played hopscotch anymore. Not in this neighborhood. Hip-hopscotch, maybe.

“Hhmph! What do you think about that?”

Paul watched the little black girl toss her pebble or cigarette butt or whatever it was to square number five, then expertly hop, hop, hop her way safely to the square and back. She was dressed in a clean, fresh, red-gingham dress with matching red bows in her neatly braided pigtails. She looked so fresh and clean and happy that he wondered what she was doing on this shithole street.

The girl was playing all by herself. Hop, hop, hop. Hop, hop, hop. She was completely absorbed in her hopping and scotching and Paul was equally absorbed watching every skip and shuffle. No one walked by and only a single taxi ruffled the otherworldly calm.

Paul leaned closer, his keen ears straining to pick up the faint sound of her shiny leather shoes scraping against the grimy concrete. He focused even more intently and heard the even fainter lilt of her soft voice. Was she singing? He pressed his ear against the glass and listened. Sure enough, she was singing. Paul smiled and closed his eyes and let the sound pour into his ear like a rich, fragrant wine.

“One, two, buckle my shoe. Three, four, shut the door…”

He listened with his eyes closed. Her soft sweet voice rose higher and higher until…the singing suddenly stopped. Paul’s eyes snapped open. The girl was gone. He craned his neck quickly to the left and saw her being pulled roughly down the street. The puller was a large, light-skinned black man, tugging on her hand/arm every two seconds like he was dragging a dog by its leash. At first, he guessed that the man was her father, a commodity as rare in this part of town as a fresh-scrubbed girl playing hopscotch. Then he wondered if he wasn’t her father after all. Maybe he was one of those kinds of men, one of those monsters that would take a sweet, pure thing to a dark, dirty place and…

And do whatever a monster like that wanted to do.

Paul pressed his face against the glass and caught a last fleeting glance of the big brown man and the tiny red-checkered girl. He watched the way he yanked on her arm, how he shook his finger, how he stooped down to slap her face and finally concluded that he was indeed her one and only Daddy dear. Who else would dare to act that way in public?

“Kids!” Paul huffed. “The kids these days!”

He laughed loud enough to rattle the windows. Then his face hardened by degrees as he pictured the yanking daddy and the formerly happy girl. Hmmm, maybe he was one of those prowling monsters after all. Paul shuddered at the thought of what a man like that would do. He imagined the scene unfolding step by step, grunting as the vision became more and more precise. “Hhmph!” he snorted after a particularly gruesome imagining. “What kind of a bug could get inside your brain and make you do a thing like that?”

“Monsters! Monsters!” he shouted, rambling back into the wasteland of his labyrinthine apartments, twisting and turning through the maze of lightless hallways as if being led by a seeing-eye dog. He walked and turned and walked some more, comforted as always by the darkness. Finally, he came to a halt and pushed hard against a wall.

His hidden sanctuary opened like Ali Baba’s cave, glowing with the treasures it contained. He stepped inside and saw the figure resting (well, not exactly resting) between the flickering candles. At the sound of his footsteps, the body on the altar twitched frantically. Paul moved closer, rubbing a smooth fingertip across the wet, trembling skin and raised it to his lips. It tasted like fear. He gazed down at the man, his eyes moving slowly from his ashen face to the rusty nails holding him so firmly in place. The warm, dark blood shining on the wooden altar made him think about the red-gingham bunny again.

“Monsters,” he said, more softly this time, wishing he weren’t so busy. As much as he would enjoy it, there simply wasn’t enough time to clean up this mess, prepare for his guests and track her down. Well, not her, precisely. Her angry tugging dad. Not that Paul had any trouble killing little girls, you understand. It just wasn’t his thing. Given a choice, he would much rather kill her father. And make her watch.

END excerpt. Want More!

As part of this special promotional extravaganza sponsored by Novel Publicity, the price of The Book of Paul eBook edition is just 99 cents this week. What’s more, by purchasing this fantastic book at an incredibly low price, you can enter to win many awesome prizes. The prizes include a Kindle Fire, $300 in Amazon gift cards, 5 autographed copies of the book, and a look into your future through a free tarot reading performed by the author.

All the info you need to win one of these amazing prizes is to visit http://www.novelpublicity.com/whirlwind-tour/paul

Remember, winning is as easy as clicking a button or leaving a blog comment--easy to enter; easy to win!

To win the prizes:

Purchase your copy of  The Book of Paul  for just 99 cents

Enter the Rafflecopter contest on Novel Publicity

About The Book of Paul

A cross-genre thriller that combines the brooding horror of Silence of the Lambs with the biting humor of Pulp Fiction. 

About the author: 

Richard Long is the author of  The Book of Paul and the forthcoming young-adult fantasy series  The Dream Palace He lives in Manhattan with his wonderful wife, two amazing children and wicked black cat, Merlin. 

Visit Richard at

His website  On Twitter  On Facebook  At Goodreads

Available at Amazon   Barnes and Noble   ibookstore

Save the Book mini-review of chapter

The author’s signature humour weaves through this chapter.

The play on words, Hip-hopscotch, appears early.

Scene switch has Paul soaking up the innocence of youth, only to be distracted by the remote possibility a stranger could be a pedophile. Paul, an extraordinary monster, rails against monsters.

Even as Paul’s monstrosity is revealed, the reader is appalled by what he would do to the father and child if he only had time.

The chapter is delicately written and subtly references some major themes of the book.

Here is our celebratory song. Enjoy.

Bernie Dowling, Day 2