October

By Michael Rowe

The time: the waning years of the 1990s at the dawn of the millennium.

The place: an isolated rural town called Auburn, which could be anywhere at all—a town where everyone knows everyone else—where dark secrets run through its veins like blood.

Everyone knows that sixteen-year old Mikey Childress is “different.” A target for bullies since he was a small boy, everything Mikey does attracts abuse: the way he walks, the way he talks, the way he looks. Everyone knows he’s not like the other boys in Auburn—the boys who play hockey, who fight, the boys who pursue girls. Only his friend Wroxy, a girl almost as isolated as he is, can even guess at the edges of his pain, or the depths of his yearning for love.

But even the people who hate Mikey couldn’t dream of how many secrets he has, or how badly he could hurt them if he wanted to.

Until the night Mikey is pushed beyond endurance by his abusers. The night he makes a pact with dark forces older than time to visit a terrible vengeance on his enemies. The night he inadvertently opens a doorway that should never, ever have been opened, and unleashes something into the world that should have remained damned.

• Language: English
• Publisher: CZP eBooks
• Release date: Oct 31, 2017
• ISBN: 9781771484480

Michael Rowe

Michael Rowe was born in Ottawa, and has lived in Beirut, Havana, Geneva, and Paris. He is the author of the novels Enter, Night; Wild Fell; and October; and created and edited the anthologies Queer Fear and Queer Fear 2. An award-winning journalist and essayist, Rowe is also the author of the nonfiction books Writing Below the Belt, Looking for Brothers, and Other Men’s Sons. He has won the Lambda Literary Award, the New Millennium Writing Award, and the Publishing Triangle Award; and was a finalist for the National Magazine Award, the International Horror Guild Award, the Sunburst Award, and the Shirley Jackson Award. Rowe lives in Toronto and welcomes readers at www.michaelrowe.com.