[ShaneCarrow]

Hey all, I'm mostly happy with this, but you know how it is when you've read the same two paragraphs a hundred times. This is a blurb for a werewolf horror novel which is a direct sequel to a vampire horror novel I did last year (you can read the blurb for that one here if you like):

France, 1916. Europe is riven by two years of machinated slaughter in the Great War. Hundreds of miles of muddy trenches and chemically-polluted wasteland run from the North Sea to Switzerland. Here at the southern border, so-called Kilometre Zero is quiet. The enlisted men are too cold and tired to pursue valour, the officers too wary of upsetting their neutral Swiss neighbours. Both French and German forces are content to huddle by their fires and let their comrades fight it out further up the line.

But something is upsetting the silent, snowy peace of Kilometre Zero. Livestock are found mutilated, a night patrol suffers a grisly encounter, and a captured German deserter carries a dire warning. As the full moon rises above the Jura Mountains, American legionnaire Sam Carter and British officer Lucas Avery once again find themselves drawn into battle with a supernatural evil...

What do you think?

 

[ShaneCarrow]

Good point. I think I opened with "France, 1916," as a mirror of the first novel's "Paris, 1914," because I very much wanted to ground the reader in an immediate time and destination for a novel set on a train which does a lot of destination-hopping. This one, that's not so important.

I do hope I'm successfully getting across the gist of the location: that this is where the Western Front runs into Switzerland and abruptly terminates, and (as it was in real life) is a much quieter and more peaceful place, relatively speaking, than the front was further north.

 

[ShaneCarrow]

Yeah, my first instinct would be to say "Swiss" border but I then say "Swiss" neighbours in the next sentence and the subeditor in me gets irked at word repetition.

 

[ShaneCarrow]

I ended up keeping it the same (though substituted machinated for mechanised - thanks Morrow) because I felt the cover does strongly signal horror, and I'm not too concerned about the historical/horror confusion; it's a direct sequel to another book and marketed as such, so I'm not expecting to pick up too many readers who haven't read the first.

For those who expressed an interest, it's now up on Amazon:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08F22WZ2V

And as I said, it's a direct sequel to my earlier book Vampire on the Orient Express, which will be marked down to 99c all of next week:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07TNP6YNG