#GuestPost ‘Inviting The Monsters In’ by Clare Daly @cdalyireland

‘Come here. Bring the darkness. Bring your monsters. There’s room at the inn.’

Today I have a Gothic tale for you all!!

Clare Daly, film publicist and now author of debut novel Our Destiny is Blood, has written a guest post entitled ‘Inviting the Monsters In’, sharing with us all how her fascination for the ‘darkness’ came to pass.

I haven’t had the opportunity to read Our Destiny is Blood yet but, wow, does it sound incredible!! From the horrors of a famine ridden Ireland, to the dark forces hidden beneath the facade of New York’s Fifth Avenue, I can already picture this on the big screen without having turned a page…

Let Clare take you on a small journey into her thoughts today and enjoy….

Inviting the Monsters In

by Clare Daly

I’ve been trying to think back to the first inklings in my life, that I might have had a leaning toward the gothic – the unnerving darkness and all that it had to offer. Sure, I can look to my teens, to finding The Lost Boys, Anne Rice and my love of vampires. I can look to the music that influenced me – that summer in 1990, sitting with my friend in her granddad’s car listening to Depeche Mode’s Violator on cassette. I fell in love with a darkness I’d never heard before. It ingrained itself in me, but maybe the door was already open.

The beast was already inside, lurking, shaped by events many years before. When a monster stole my baby.

I don’t really recall how she came to be in his jaws, but there she was, trapped, unable to cry for help – a seven-year-old’s most prized possession, impaled on the sharp teeth of the neighbourhood menace. His name was Rebel. She was Tiny Tears, brought by Santa. I must have dropped her when I saw him approaching. He was running, a dog with short little legs, always moving at a rapid pace. Coming for me. I can remember turning to look back at him, assuming him hot on my heels and then realising that he had picked her up and was running away in the opposite direction. He didn’t want my flesh after all – he wanted the cool plastic and fluffy nylon yellow hair of her. I tried to run after him, half terrified, half defiant – he couldn’t have her – until he disappeared from sight and so I ran home instead. To safety. Tears, not tiny, but streaming down my red cheeks.

Sometime later, retrieved or found by one of the local kids, I got her back. She was just a torso, limbs depleted, secreted in his den probably. I was heartbroken. The beast had stolen her from me. I had a fear of dogs harking back to a bite a year or two earlier – teeth marks, no broken flesh but enough to make me suspect every cute animal of hiding a primal urge to devour. To me, he was a dangerous snarling creature, right in my midst.

From then on, I watched for them – the beasts – the danger. I fought witches and monsters in my recurring nightmares, same dream all the time. Over and over. I could even tell the nights they would come. I couldn’t stand the silence as sleep came – white noise drilling deep into my ears and I knew it would come then, as if I had beckoned it. Maybe I did. I embraced it in my teens, presented to me in movies, books and music that appealed to my dark sensibilities.

Come here. Bring the darkness. Bring your monsters. There’s room at the inn.

I finally grew out of the nightmares. They traversed to dreams, ones to become fascinated by instead of horrified. That my first novel was borne from such a dream shouldn’t have come as a surprise to me, so vivid a brief picture did it paint. I have Our Destiny Is Blood because of it – because even now, I still watch for the danger and the delicious joy of facing the monster head on.

Book Info:

Ireland, 1847. Seventeen-year-old EVELYN MOONEY has just burnt a man to death with her bare hands. Now she has to run, keeping it a secret from her brother MICHAEL, until she can figure it out. Together they flee their famine stricken homeland, crossing the Atlantic to New York and into the household of Russian aristocrat VLADIMIR DERMATOV.

But their new master has a secret of his own and when his dead brother makes a miraculous return, the stage is set for a reunion unlike any other.

For SASHA is now a vampire, seeking retribution on the brother that left him in the hands of a monster. Their fates will be decided in the mansions of Fifth Avenue and far below them, for a dark force lurks beneath the city who would bring them all together.

Purchase Link ~ Our Destiny is Blood

 

Author Bio:

Clare Daly has worked as a film publicist for over twenty years in film distribution in Ireland, on some of Hollywood’s biggest blockbusters.

In April 2015, Clare began a blog called The Dark Blue Light, as she describes it herself ‘my own little drawer in the internet in which to keep my movie reviews and general head scratchings as I wrote my first novel.’

Our Destiny Is Blood was released to the virtual book shelves on October 27th.

The next book in the Destiny vampire series will be unveiled in Spring 2018.

Website ~ https://claredalyauthor.com/

Twitter ~ @cdalyireland