Guest Post/Giveaway with Nancy Holzner Author of Bloodstone

Please give a warm welcome to Nancy who is guest posting today, my review of Bloodstone will be posted tomorrow, keep on the look out for that. Without further ado here is Nancy.

Thanks so much for inviting me to stop by Book Lover's Hideaway! Today is release day for BLOODSTONE, the third book in my Deadtown urban fantasy series. To celebrate, I'd like to take

your readers on a nighttime tour of Deadtown, Boston's paranormal-only section. Deadtown is home to Vicky Vaughn, a shapeshifter who kills other people's personal demons for a living. So grab your coat (Boston gets chilly at night) and let's go!

A Walk Through Deadtown

If you want to take a look around Deadtown, the cordoned-off area for Boston’s paranormal residents, there’s not much point in going during the day. Even if you made it through the checkpoint (do you have your papers in order?), you’d find that Deadtown by day is more or less a ghost town—its streets empty save for the occasional werewolf or a bundled-up zombie working the day shift. The silent buildings could belong to any city’s downtown: concrete skyscrapers mingling with old brick buildings and the huge plate-glass windows of long-closed department stores.

Deadtown comes to life—or unlife—after the sun goes down. Soon after darkness has settled, the zombies begin to venture out, heading for work. Thanks to their superhuman strength, most zombies do manual labor. Three years ago, after a localized plague killed two thousand Bostonians in a matter of hours (and resurrected them three days later), the quarantine zone became Deadtown. At the time, office buildings, stores, and banks had to be converted to residences, and the resulting construction boom employed many zombies. With time, though, Deadtown has become a city-within-a-city, and zombies provide most of the services you’d find in any town. There are zombie bankers, zombie teachers, zombie mail carriers, zombie grocery store owners, zombie hot-dog vendors, zombie chefs (any business related to food is a good bet in Deadtown).

As you’ve probably noticed by now, Deadtown’s zombies aren’t your average, run-of-the-mill, horror- movie brain munchers. They’re a lot like people who haven’t gone through the experience of being dead for a few days and then waking up. In fact, the politically correct term for zombies is “previously deceased humans,” or PDHs. Deadtown’s zombies have thoughts and personalities. They also have spongy, greenish-gray skin and blood-red eyes. They move stiffly, but they’re incredibly strong. They’re nearly impossible to kill (maybe because they’ve already been dead once), but they don’t heal when injured. And even though they’re always hungry, usually they’d rather snack on junk food than on human flesh—unless they catch a whiff of blood. When zombie blood lust gets stirred up, they can’t help themselves. So if you’re prone to sudden nosebleeds, you might want to cross Deadtown off your must-visit list.

Around ten o’clock, the vampires emerge to go hunting. They don’t hang around Deadtown for long. Zombies taste bad and shapeshifter blood does strange things to a vampire’s system, so the vampires slink off to the human parts of Boston or one of the monster bars in the New Combat Zone, the no-man’s land between the checkpoints into Deadtown and human-controlled Boston. The Zone is where humans go when they’re craving a walk on the wild side. A norm can venture into a monster bar like Creature Comforts and gawk at vampires, zombies, and other creatures of the night in relative safety (as long as they don’t get caught in the middle of a werewolf fight). Axel, who owns Creature Comforts, is seven feet tall, bearded, with a hook nose and tiny eyes—nobody quite knows what he is, but he’s definitely not human. Axel usually opens up around ten, because that’s when the norms arrive. Humans tend to be nervous in the Zone; nervous customers drink, and drinking customers make Axel happy. But the bars don’t really get busy until most of the norms have left and are tucked into their warm, safe beds at home, dreaming about how brave they were to venture so close to the monsters.

Victory Vaughn, Boston’s only professional demonslayer, also heads out around ten. A shapeshifter descended from the Welsh goddess Ceridwen, Vicky exterminates other people’s personal demons for a living. Since demons can only materialize after dark, she works the night shift. Most of Vicky’s clients need help with one of the three main kinds of personal demons:

• Drudes, dream-demons that feed on fear and cause nightmares
• Eidolons, guilt demons that gnaw at people's guts when they can’t sleep
• Harpies, revenge demons conjured by an unscrupulous sorcerer for cash

Fighting demons can be dangerous, but it pays well—people desperate for some peace will pay pretty much whatever they can afford to get it. Vicky’s no mercenary, but she makes a decent living. After she’s shot a flock Harpies out of the sky or chased the Drudes out of a client’s dreamscape, she usually stops by Creature Comforts on her way home. There she might meet Juliet, her vampire roommate, who’s sipping a Bloody Mary and ignoring the vampire junkies begging her to take a hit from them. She probably won’t see Kane, the lawyer she sometimes dates, because like most werewolves he works norm hours—eight-to-five, Monday through Friday—except for the three days around the full moon, when he reports to one of the state’s three werewolf retreats.

As the sun comes up, most Deadtown residents, including Vicky, make their way home for the day. The checkpoints get crowded with paranormals waiting to show their IDs. Zombies pull on hats,
scarves, gloves, sunglasses—sunlight causes permanent damage to their skin and eyes—before they venture outside. Vampires sleep the sleep of the dead behind black-out shades. For the next several hours, Deadtown will be quiet, until the shadows lengthen and the night calls to its creatures once again.

***

I hope you enjoyed this visit to paranormal Boston! If you'd like to know more, please visit my website, www.nancyholzner.com, which has information about my books, including first chapters. You can also find me on Facebook and Twitter. Besides urban fantasy, I also write a quirky contemporary mystery series set in a college town in upstate New York. Peace, Love, and Murder has been a bestselling ebook on Amazon, and its sequel will be out in early 2012.

About The Author:

Nancy Holzner grew up in western Massachusetts with her nose stuck in a book. This meant that she tended to walk into things, wore glasses before she was out of elementary school, and forced her parents to institute a “no reading at the dinner table” rule. It was probably inevitable that she majored in English in

college and then, because there were still a lot of books she wanted to read, continued her studies long enough to earn a masters degree and a PhD.

She began her career as a medievalist, then jumped off the tenure track to try some other things. Besides teaching English and philosophy, she’s worked as a technical writer, freelance editor and instructional designer, college admissions counselor, and corporate trainer. Most of her nonfiction books are published under the name Nancy Conner.

Nancy lives in upstate New York with her husband Steve, where they both work from home without getting on each other’s nerves. She enjoys visiting local wineries and listening obsessively to opera. There are still a lot of books she wants to read.

http://nancyholzner.wordpress.com/

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Nancy-Holzner/163746834500

http://twitter.com/#!/NancyHolzner

Giveaway Details:

Nancy is offering 5 book giveaways- 5 winners.

Each of five winners gets his/her choice of a signed copy of Deadtown, Hellforged, or Bloodstone.

This giveaway is open to US only

Click HERE to enter