Fabulous and Brunette: Amber Hollow by Edgar Swamp - Book Tour - Guest Post - Giveaway

Hi, lovelies! It gives me great pleasure today to host Edgar Swamp and his new book, “Amber Hollow”! For other stops on his Goddess Fish Promotions Book Tour, please click on the banner above or any of the images in this post.

Be sure to make it to the end of this post to enter to win a $10 Amazon or Barnes and Noble Gift Card!! Also, come back daily to interact with Edgar and to increase your chances of winning!

Thanks for stopping by! Wishing you lots of luck in this fabulous giveaway!

Amber Hollow

by Edgar Swamp

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GENRE: Horror

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BLURB:

On July 15, 1991, an isolated village in Northern Wisconsin is ground zero for an unprecedented, fiery tragedy. Of the community's 600 residents, there are only five survivors. Detailed accounts by the victims contradict each other; the only link is a man named Anthony Guntram, but because he is presumed to be dead, this claim can't be verified. Further investigations reveal a culture enshrouded in mystery. What are the survivors hiding?

Only the villagers know the secret of Amber Hollow, a place where sanity is checked at the town line and the parameters of reality become blurred. An unconventional horror story by design, Edgar Swamp delivers an action-driven page-turner that will keep readers guessing until the calamitous ending.

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EXCERPT ONE:

The call came when they were five blocks from St. Mary’s, blaring from the radio in a raucous hiss of static that made both of them jump. Sadie looked at Jeremy, and the confusion in her eyes would be almost comical if the situation wasn’t so dire. He grabbed the handset on the radio, pressed the button.

“This is Detective Jeremy LeFevre. Please repeat the transmission.”

“There is a ten fifty-six A in progress on the Tower Drive Bridge, I repeat a ten fifty-six A.”

“We’re two miles from that location,” he said calmly, although his nerves suddenly felt as if they were live wires spitting enough electricity to power the entire city. “We’re en route.”

“Ten four,” the dispatcher said, and Sadie flipped a switch on the dash that fired up the siren. She then grabbed the bubble next to her, rolled down her window, and tossed it onto the top of the car where the magnet on the bottom held it firmly in place. For some reason, she always felt like she was in an episode of Starskey and Hutch when she did that.

“You thinking what I’m thinking?” Jeremy asked his partner.

“What are you thinking?”

“I don’t know, maybe I’m jumping to more conclusions, but somehow I think this is one call we need to take.”

Turned out, he was right.

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GUEST POST:

Bring on the boo’s! Everyone loves to hate the villain! Tell us all about this truly loathed character and the inspiration behind their development.

All of my novels incorporate a person that is genuinely evil; I pride myself in coming up with such nasty villains that I’ve had some readers tell me they were a lot happier when they weren’t on the page! To me, that is the highest form of praise.

As much as we love reading books with characters that we can admire and root for, there has to be the other side of the coin, the person that makes everyone else’s life a living hell. In reality, we all know someone, on some level, that embodies these traits. At every job I have ever worked at, in many different industries, there has always been a person there who seemed to be the one destined to be “out to get me.” For everyone, there is a foil. In real life (hopefully) these people aren’t trying to kill you; they are just annoying to no end and get their jollies questioning every move you make, or pointing out your flaws or mistakes.

The villain can be anyone; they don’t have to be the stereotypical hockey-mask-wearing, chainsaw-wielding uber-creep. I once created an elderly female villain who was so repugnant that a reviewer who read the book told me that no one could possibly be THAT evil. The funny thing was, she was a real person I actually knew, and the things I described her as doing were things she’d really done. I embellished a little, but the main point is that she really WAS that evil; it is amazing what people can be capable of when they believe what they are doing is “right.”

It sometimes seems that with fiction, writers have a tendency to try and give their villains some redeeming value (not all, like Pennywise the Dancing Clown, who has none) but like Jason Vorhees (the aforementioned hockey-mask-wearing killer) who was ignored by the camp counselors while he was swimming, he drowned, his mother avenged him, and then he sought to take his own revenge. Sometimes these bad guys have a reason for wanting to slice and dice half-naked coeds!

In my first novel, The Gyre Mission, I created a bad guy who became evil by circumstance, and at a point in the book, I showed that he was just as much a victim as the people he was brutalizing; he’d been put in the position he was in unwillingly. I didn’t reveal this until the last quarter of the book because I didn’t want readers to sympathize with him, but near the end, I made it obvious because I wanted to bring more depth to his character.

In Amber Hollow, I created a villain that is a composite of many real-life people, from high-profile media darlings to regular people who committed criminal deeds, stories I pulled from news headlines. I needed to create a character who was not only homicidally insane, ruthless, and psychotically narcissistic but also charming and charismatic. In other words, a character that represented either a notorious serial killer or a politician! In fact, the villain in Amber Hollow is purported to be a politician, although with the rampant distortion of facts from the unreliable narrators I can’t tell you for sure if he is or isn’t — you’d have to read the book to see.

The point is, I set out to create a person who’s every deed is intended to benefit himself, one who manipulates people to do his bidding if he isn’t up to performing the evil task himself but who has no problem getting his hands dirty if necessary, happily in fact, over and over again. As I previously mentioned regarding the depth of a villain’s character, I like to give reasons why they became what they did; behind every killer, there has to be a backstory, right? Why did this person become the cold-hearted monster they are? What happened to make them take out such inhumane injustice on the innocent people around them? With my villain in Amber Hollow, I eschewed all of that and created a human being with utterly no compassion, one who would do anything for himself while putting everyone else in harm’s way. The ultimate epitome of a serial killer, one who kills with no remorse, is literally detached from all societal norms. That type of villain has no redeeming social value and cannot be sympathized with.

I think that is the scariest kind.

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AUTHOR BIO:

Edgar Swamp is the author of the “Gyre Mission,” “Glitch in the Machine,” and “Blackout.” His short stories have appeared in Alienskin, Macabre Cadaver, and Urban Reinventors. When he isn’t holed up in his office playing online poker, he likes to dig up the recently deceased and make furniture out of their skin. He lives and works in San Diego, California.

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CONNECT WITH EDGAR:

Website:

http://www.edgarswamp.com

Email:

gyremission@edgarswamp.com

Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/Edgaraaronswamp

BookBub Author Page:

https://www.bookbub.com/authors/edgar-swamp

BookBub Book Page:

https://www.bookbub.com/books/amber-hollow-by-edgar-swamp

Goodreads Author Page:

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6545927.Edgar_Swamp

Goodreads Book Page:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49979322-amber-hollow

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BOOK BUY LINKS:

Amazon Kindle eBook:

https://amzn.to/2MMkYBD

Amazon Paperback:

https://amzn.to/2MM8yK7

Barnes and Noble Paperback:

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/amber-hollow-edgar-swamp/1134126471

The Book Depository Paperback:

https://www.bookdepository.com/Amber-Hollow-Edgar-Swamp/9780578496443

BAM! Books-A-Million Paperback:

https://www.booksamillion.com/p/Amber-Hollow/Edgar-Swamp/9780578496443

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GIVEAWAY INFO:

Edgar will be awarding a $10 Amazon or B/N GC to a randomly drawn winner via Rafflecopter during the tour.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

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This contest is sponsored by a third party. Fabulous and Brunette is a registered host of Goddess Fish Promotions. Prizes are given away by the sponsors and not Fabulous and Brunette. The featured author and Goddess Fish Promotions are solely responsible for the giveaway prize.