Series Spotlight Tour and Giveaway: Dark Walker Series by Shelly Campbell

 

Check out the Dark Walker series by Shelly Campbell today and make sure to enter the tour wide giveaway for a chance to win from the author $15 Amazon/BN gift card to a randomly drawn winner. The tour is sponsored by Goddess Fish Promotions and you can find all the tour stops HERE.

Interview with Author:

Tell us about your latest book, who are the main character’s and what can we expect when we pick it up?

My latest book, Breach, is book 2 in the Dark Walker series. It’s a sci-fi horror that one of my good friends, Darby Harn, describes as:

Imagine Doctor Who moving between alternate worlds in a used Ford Pinto and you’d have something like Breach.

In book one, our main character, David, is inexplicably becoming invisible, and desperately trying to save his family from nocturnal monsters who want to devour his world. We get an idea that whatever is on the other side of the door David has opened is hostile and complex. In book two, Breach, David’s on the other side, out of his element, and navigating new dimensions. Everyone he meets wants something from him, and he doesn’t know who to trust. Expect raw, nuanced characters, vivid imagery, and a compelling story (hopefully J).

 

Do you come up with the hook first, or do you create characters first and then dig through until you find a hook?

Good question! I come up with the hook first, then I come up with what my main character needs to give them a satisfying arc. It’s going to directly contrast what they think they need. For example, David’s entire life has reinforced the idea that when he’s loud, the world bites back. In the past, whenever he’s spoken up, stood up for someone, or transcended his invisibility, bad things happened. Consequently, he carries the misbelief that if he doesn’t go with the flow, if he makes waves, his world will punish him for it. The thing is, he needs to be loud and disruptive to save his family from the monsters hunting them. He needs to make waves. Big ones.

In book 2, Breach, he needs to connect with people to help him through alien worlds, but he can’t, because I surround him with people who are giving him mixed signals. They have ulterior motives and David can sense that.

 

Which of your own characters would you like to have lunch with? 

Oh gosh. I put my characters through so much abuse I think I’d end up with my lunch thrown in my lap if I invited any of them to lunch. David would be cool to have lunch with though, once he was done pouring a drink on my head. I feel like I owe him that. I owe him a lifetime of lunches.

 

Tell us about what you are reading at the moment or anticipate reading in the future? Any favorite authors you enjoy reading in your spare time?

I anticipate reading anything by Al Hess, Darby Harn, Jennifer Lane, Essa Hansen and Sunyi Dean. Not only are they my good friends and critique partners, but everything they write just blows me away. You know when you read something and think man alive, I could never reach this level of writing! That’s everything these authors write. Every. Single. Thing.

 

Which of your own books would you like to live in? 

Dang. Hard pass. None of the worlds I’ve created in my horror, sci-fi, or fantasy are warm and comfy places. I don’t think I’d survive long in any of them. I suppose, if pressed, I’d pick my YA post apocalyptic solar flare book, Knowledge Itself. It’s been decades since solar flares knocked out the electrical grids in Canada. Life has gone back to basics, but it’s survivable, at least.

 

What do you do when you have free time?

I garden, paddle board, write, watch my kiddos play sports, binge watch my favorite TV shows. Pretty tame stuff.

How do you approach character development in your stories? Do you have any specific techniques or methods that you find particularly effective?

I develop my characters as I go in my first draft. Scratch that. They kind of develop themselves as we go. I know I need to put them in situations that change them. I know they need to be different by the end of the story. They have to evolve or devolve. And I’ve got to make them real enough that my readers care for them. Why on earth would anyone stick around for a whole novel to find out what happens to these characters if they don’t care for them?

What do you believe sets your writing apart from others in your genre, and why should readers choose to read your books?

I’ve been told that I excel at making people fall in love with my characters, and then ripping reader’s hearts out with the grim situations I put them in. So, if you like character-driven fiction where people go through some serious trauma, but come out the other side of it still clinging to hope, I’ve got you, boo.

 

Can you discuss any upcoming projects or books that you're currently working on? What can readers expect from your future works?

I am currently working on book 3 in the Sol Survivor series. The afore mentioned Knowledge Itself is book one, so I’m exploring post-apocalyptic near future Canada with my ADHD main character Iris and crew. This series is YA with found family, neurodiversity and disability representation. I’m co-writing it with Megan King, and we’d love if you checked out some sample chapters of the first two books, Knowledge Itself and Madness of People. 

Thanks so much for having me! I really appreciate the support.

DARK WALKER SERIES

Author: Shelly Campbell

GENRE:   Speculative Fiction/Horror/ Dark Sci-fi

Series Blurb:

 

When we were children, they told us monsters weren't real. They were dead wrong.

 

It’s just a closet door with a skeleton key, but when David opens it, he unlocks a gateway to a sinister world that’s bent on destroying everything and everyone he loves. Some doors are better left closed.

 

Embark on a thrilling journey with the Dark Walker Series, and be transported into an interdimensional tale of monsters, lies and self-discovery. Where the terror of darkness is real and the line between ally and enemy is as thin as a blade.

 

"Equal parts coming of age story and otherworldly horror, Gulf probes the depths of loneliness, loss of identity and childhood trauma. It is a true treat for fans of the genre and had me clutched in its razor-clawed hands from the first word to the last.” -C.M. Forest author of Infested

Excerpt One from GULF:

 

Certain my family is gone, I cross to the five-panel in two strides, twist the key into the lock, and push the door.

 

It doesn’t open.

 

Of course it doesn’t, idiot. It’s still hung like a closet door. It opens out, not in.

 

I pull.

 

Mirror.

 

That’s the first thought that strikes me as I take in the exact duplicate of the living room I’m standing in. Same green, crushed velvet sofa bed sagging behind me. Identical chipped melamine cabinets. Same painted windmills on the porcelain tile backsplash—wait.

 

No me.

 

No reflection of me. Tentative as Alice in bloody Wonderland, I pull the black skeleton key from its hole and crane my head through the doorway. No dirty breakfast dishes, but when I look over my shoulder, there’s still stacks of egg-yolk spackled tin plates beside our sink. Crumpled under one arm of the hide-a-bed is my plaid blanket, but the one in front of me is empty. Looks dusty.

 

“What the hell, Everett?” This is creepy.

 

The ole bugger’s built an exact mirror image of the room next door. Where on earth did he find the twin to that green monster of a couch? There’s even a spring beckoning through the same spot in the back cushion.

 

Got an eye for detail, hasn’t he?

 

Same woodstove too, only this one has a cold, crusty frying pan on it. I can still feel the heat on my back from ours across the wall.

 

The pine planking creaks under my next step, and I jump and then smile, but I’m pretty sure it ends up as a snarl. An odd feeling consumes me whole, the one I had just before Sam Ren and his gorilla wingmen beat the piss out of me behind the Dairy Queen. A curdled sense of approaching doom slithers through my lungs.

 

Get out.

 

Primal instinct presses me back a step toward the door, but I hold fast there, like a dumbass, like I waited while Sam Ren eased toward me in the Dairy Queen parking lot.

 

Shaking out my hands and hissing through my teeth, I scan the room trying to identify what’s wrong, because something is. Something is very wrong, and it’s not just the duplicate room, or the draft emanating from here at night. It takes a few seconds to pin it down. The out-of-place thing. My throat spasms when I see it. I swallow and shift to the balls of my feet.

 

“Window,” I whisper.

 

Book One Blurb:

 

Seventeen-year-old David is fading from his world, like a Polaroid picture in reverse. He longs to feel connected to something bigger.

 

When his brothers discover the new extension at the rental cottage comes with a locked door, David finds the key first. Expecting to claim a bedroom, he opens a dimensional gateway instead, exploring abandoned versions of his world in different timelines, 1960s muscle cars alternating with crumbling cottages.

 

Except now the dimensional bridge won’t close, and something hungry claws the door at night. David scours for clues to break the bridge, but each trip to the other side makes him fade more on his. Even if he succeeds, he risks severing his connection to his own world, and dying on the wrong side, forgotten.

 

Book Two Blurb:

 

There are doors that open to other worlds, but it’s no fairytale on the other side.

 

I thought otherworldly monsters bent on devouring my whole world starting with my family trumped everything. Turns out, I was wrong. My world's only one of thousands facing annihilation from the maneaters that tried to eat me alive. Charlie saved me, rolled into my life on a motorcycle, and rescued me.

 

Problem is, I’m the Embassy’s property now. They’re the interdimensional agency tasked with stemming the flow of ravenous aliens into our universe, but they seem more interested in studying me. I crashed a gateway in a way they’ve never seen. The Embassy wants to replicate that. I think they want to use me as a war weapon.

 

If I don’t convince Charlie to help me escape, I’ll be an Embassy science experiment for the rest of my short life, or worse, eternally trapped in the dark hell that fills the spaces between worlds.

  

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AUTHOR Bio and Links: 

At a young age, Shelly Campbell wanted to be an air show pilot or a pirate, possibly a dragon and definitely a writer and artist. She’s piloted a Cessna 172 through spins and stalls, and sailed up the east coast on a tall ship barque—mostly without projectile vomiting. In the end, Shelly found writing and drawing dragons to be so much easier on the stomach. Shelly writes speculative fiction ranging from grimdark fantasy, to sci-fi and horror. She’d love to hear from you.

 

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