Dear Friends Who Read and Readers Who Are Friends,
When I finish a novel and the book works — and heaven knows that’s not always the case — I am left with a distinct postpartum sadness. I miss the characters and spending time with them in my library everyday. The truth is, I never write from an outline: I depend upon my characters to take me by the hand and lead me through the dark of the story.
The sadness I felt when I finished “The Sleepwalker” — on sale January 10 — was intense. When my daughter was nineteen, she said to me after reading the rough draft of one of my novels, “Dad, take this as a compliment, because I mean it that way, but I think your sweet spot as a writer is seriously messed up young women.”
She is indeed astute.
But there are a couple of young women trying desperately to navigate life in the wake of their mother’s strange disappearance in “The Sleepwalker” — not just one. The postpartum sadness I felt when I completed that book was particularly acute.
And so I returned one last time to their lives and the result is “The Premonition,” a 40-page stand-alone prequel to my next book.
It tells the tale of one strange summer when a pair of horses die, an odd boy moves to a small Vermont town, and a woman rises from her bed and disappears into the night.
Lianna Ahlberg is seventeen when a thunderstorm snaps a power line to the earth, electrifying the ground, the rain spreading the current like wildfire across the wet grass. Two horses are killed in the nearby field, unnerving the neighbors, upsetting the peculiar boy who has just moved in, and filling Lianna with a deep and abiding sense of dread. This is not the first unusual thing to happen that summer—a summer when Lianna’s mother begins to sleepwalk in the smallest hours of morning—and it will not be the last.
You can download “The Premonition” today from ibooks, amazon, kobo, books a million, google play, and bn.com.
Fingers crossed you enjoy it — and my work never disappoints you. Thank you as always for your faith in my work.
All the best,
Chris B.
