Hi peeps, we have Caleb James and his upcoming release Dark Blood, we have a fantastic guest post from Caleb and a brilliant excerpt so enjoy the post and check out that spookily, scary, eerie cover! <3 ~Pixie~
Dark Blood
Caleb James
Handsome, brilliant, and surrounded by good friends, twenty-three-year-old medical student Miles Fox has a secret—and it’s not that he’s gay. Though he harbors a crush on his straight best friend, Luke. Miles, like his grandmother, Anna, possesses the healing gift, an ability she’s made him swear never to use or divulge, lest horrible things befall those he loves. It happened to her when Nazis butchered her family.
But it all goes to hell when Miles heals a terminally ill man on a New Orleans cancer ward and wakes locked in the psych unit. Worse, news of the healing miracle spreads. For millennia, its carriers have been hunted by those who would steal it. Dr. Gerald Stangl and his teenage son, Calvin, know what Miles possesses. They, like their predecessors, will stop at nothing to take it, including kidnapping, torture, and murder. As the Stangls’ noose tightens, Miles and Luke are trapped in a death match with stakes higher than they could ever imagine.
What’s in a pen name?
By: Caleb James, Charles Atkins, & Dr. Atkins
“What should my name be?” I asked my partner Steve a few years back as I prepared to submit Haffling to Dreamspinner. “I was thinking where it’s got all that Irish mythology maybe use the surname James, as in James Joyce. But what should I use for the first name? I could do Jerod, but he’s one of the characters in the book, so it might be confusing…”
“What about Colum or Caluum, or Caleb?”
“Caleb works…Caleb James.” That’s how it happened. Here comes the why. I’m not a new author, not by a long shot. My first murder mystery—THE PORTRAIT (St. Martin’s Press)—came out in 1998. At the time I didn’t think of using a pen name even though I had concerns about how deeply personal that book was.
Years passed and I built up a back list, including a series of dark thrillers with a female forensic psychiatrist—THE PRODIGY, MOTHER’S MILK, and ASHES ASHES—. Then someone contacted my agent wanting an author who could write a book on bipolar disorder—I am a psychiatrist, so he lobbed it my way. But still, no need for a pen name, I just added the MD—trust me I’m a doctor. So Dr. Atkins, not the diet doctor, was born. To date, he has three nonfiction books on Bipolar Disorder, Alzheimers, and a textbook on Co-Occurring Substance Use and Mental Disorders.
Time rattled along and Charles Atkins wrote a series of murder mysteries with two older lesbian protagonists. I even got to be a Lambda Literary finalist for best lesbian mystery (DONE TO DEATH (Severn House). With these books I did think about using a pen name as they were so different from my other thrillers, much more of a cozy than a creep fest. I even did a supernatural thriller about the whorish relationship between physicians and the drug companies (GO TO HELL (Argo Navis) and that one had me on the cusp of pushing the button. I had the name ready to go—Jaspard Marks—an amalgam of some family names.
But here’s how Caleb was born. Every year since I can remember I’ve gone to Book Expo America. I’m at the one in Chicago right now. About seven or eight years ago, as I’m bopping around grabbing free books and chatting with random strangers—but is anyone into books really a stranger?—I came upon a curious booth. It was manned—er womanned—by Elizabeth North and a cadre of early Dreamspinner comrades. I perused their wares, and one has to be careful at Book Expo because there are some booths on the fringes where its best to walk fast and not make eye contact with the merchant. To do so can lead to a lengthy discourse on the book they’ve written as to why Sarah Palin should be crowned queen of the three realms. Or their fabulous new series with a black-belt special ops nun. But back to the story and what was in Elizabeth’s booth. It was something I’d not seen. Covers with two men, many of them in what is referred to in the romance trade as “the clutch”.
How curious and wonderful, I thought. This in a time where all/most of the gay genre publishers and imprints had vanished. More than that, what was being offered was reading with LGBT protagonists that was positive and pure fun.
So I chatted with Elizabeth, grabbed several books and stuck them in my bag—and seriously if you’re into books you need to beg, borrow, or steal your way into Book Expo. At the time I was working on other book projects, both as the Dr. and as plain me, but I tucked away the meeting and every year would stop by the Dreamspinner booth, nab books, and chat with the various editors, authors, and of course, Elizabeth.
So somewhere around 2011, when talking with editor Anne Regan I came up with the idea of doing a YA novel, HAFFLING. I loved writing the book, attached it to an email to Anne and sure enough they said yes. At this point I had to face facts, books that were so different from everything else I’d written had to come out with a different product name. And so that’s how Caleb came to be.
I do hope that readers of Caleb’s new thriller DARK BLOOD, not YA but could be considered New Adult, will find their way to HAFFLING and then to my other titles. But I understand that readers like what they like. That said, my favorite amazon and Goodreads reviews start with, “I don’t normally like reading (insert genre here) but I loved this book! And I think you will too.”
Excerpt
Amos turned, stopped, and dropped the drool-covered red rubber ball. He pawed the ground and nudged the toy with his nose. He barked. It was a game, and Miles knew if he approached too fast, Amos would grab the ball in his mouth and race off.
He inched forward. “I’m not going to take the ball. Nope, not me. Not interested. Who’d want that stinky thing?” He skimmed his red sneakers forward like the ninjas he’d watch on TV with Grandma Anna. His eyes and the dog’s locked. The space between them narrowed from ten feet, to nine, to eight. The animal’s lustrous red-gold fur sparked in the sun. Muscles in his back twitched as he tracked Miles’s stealthy approach.
“I don’t want the ball. It’s slimy. Who’d want a ball like that?” Ninja sneakers slid forward, seven feet, six feet. Boy and dog focused on each other and the game. Five feet, four feet. “I don’t want it.” Three feet, two feet. “Uh-uh, not me.”
As though each could read the other’s thoughts, Miles and Amos lunged for the ball. The pup was closer and faster. He gripped the prize between his teeth and raced down the hill with Miles in pursuit.
Caught in the moment and the ecstasy of flight and pursuit, neither Amos nor Miles saw the heavily laden burgundy Dodge Caravan as it turned off Highway 6A.
Likewise, the driver was distracted by his oldest daughter punching her little brother in the arm. It had been a miserable six-hour drive with no AC, three children, including the new baby, and his largely unresponsive wife, who suffered an emotional meltdown after giving birth three months earlier. He did not see the dog or the boy. What would become seared into his memory was the sequence that started with his daughter’s scream— “Daddy!”—followed by a dull thud and single surprised yelp as the twoton vehicle going thirty-five miles an hour made impact with the dog. The animal flew for what seemed an impossible distance.
His pulse jumped as he slammed on the brakes. He saw the darkhaired child racing toward them as he broke through a beach plum hedge, and for a split second he feared there’d be a second impact. Tires squealed as they burned rubber and ground fine white sand into the asphalt. He spotted the red dog in the rearview mirror, not moving save for blood that pulsed from an open wound onto the hot tar. From the angle the dog lay, it was clear his neck was broken.
“Don’t look!” he barked to his family, who stared in horror at the unfolding tragedy. “Shit,” he muttered.
His wife turned, her lip trembled, her mouth opened into a scream: “No!” He saw condemnation in her eyes.
I didn’t see him. This wasn’t my fault. One more sin that would be laid at his doorstep. He opened the door, not certain what he was supposed to do. “Kids, stay in the car! Don’t look.”
His feet touched the pavement, his attention riveted on the dying animal. He wanted to warn the little boy away from his pet. “I’m sorry,” he muttered. “I’m so sorry.”
Up on the hill, two women emerged onto the porch of the twostory white house, a few hundred feet from the accident. The younger held a toddler’s hand while the older, dressed in black, her silver hair in a bun, started to jog toward them. She screamed at the little boy who crouched in the middle of the road, touching the dog’s unmoving head, “Miles, no! Don’t!”
What happened next the man would never understand and would never forget. As he stood frozen, the little boy lay next to the fatally wounded animal. He knew he should intervene to pull the kid away, but there was something so tender in how he wrapped his little body around the puppy.
The woman’s screams grew as she ran on arthritic knees.
“Miles, don’t! Stop! No! Please, God, stop it. Now!”
All the man could see was the child, his body fused to the dog’s, moving his lips as though singing. His hands fluttered across the dog’s fur; they blurred like hummingbird wings. There’s something wrong with this kid. This isn’t normal. The boy was drawing designs across the dog’s body. He trilled his fingers impossibly fast, first this way and then that.
And then it happened. The animal convulsed. His hind legs, which at first glance the driver thought were broken, kicked back. They were synchronous and straight. He found purchase on the pavement with his front legs. The boy rolled back on the asphalt. He stopped the freakish movement of his hands, and for a moment the man wondered if he’d been hit as well. The kid’s face was flushed and smeared with blood, his striped shirt was drenched in it. His green, green eyes stared, unmoving.
The dog stood up, shook his head, and then his entire body, starting from his tail and ending with his fuzzy golden nose. Blood whipped off the animal in all directions; the droplets sparkled like garnets.
The dog turned to the boy. His broad pink tongue licked the kid’s face from chin to forehead. The man held his breath. He stared at the blood on the boy’s chest. Don’t be dead. Please God, don’t be dead.
“Amos.” The boy recoiled from the dog’s tongue bath and threw his arms around the animal’s shoulders.
“Miles!” The woman had made it through the hedge to the road’s edge. She looked from the boy and dog to the man standing ten feet from the minivan.
Her eyes were a vivid green like a cat’s, like the boy’s. She glared at the driver. He felt her rage and fought back a childhood memory of a fairy-tale witch. “Get out! Get in your car and get out!”
He wanted to argue, to say he was sorry, to give her his insurance information, to….
“Leave!” He looked at the boy and the dog. He saw the steaming pool of blood on hot asphalt. Too much of it for the boy and dog to be unhurt, for the dog to be alive… but he is.
“Leave now!” He could almost feel the words of a curse about to be hurled in his direction. Of course that was a ridiculous thought, and he pictured the boy’s hummingbird hands. The kid stared wide-eyed at the woman. Maybe it was a trick of the summer sun, but his eyes glowed as though lit from inside his skull.
About Caleb James
Caleb James is an author, member of the Yale volunteer faculty, practicing psychiatrist, and clinical trainer. He writes both fiction and nonfiction and has published books in multiple genres and under different names. Writing as Charles Atkins, he has been a Lambda Literary finalist. He lives in Connecticut with his partner and four cats.
