Piercing the Veil
by Guy Riessen
Genre: Horror, Supernatural Occult Thriller
What do flesh-eating cell phones, brain-enhancing tacos, and a real live dead foot have in common?
They're all tools in the destruction of our world, and a weapons-grade team of heavily-armed Miskatonic University nerds may be humanity’s last hope.
Something is ripping holes in the Veil of energy that separates our world from that of the ancient evils writhing just beyond what we think is reality. Time is running out for Professors Derrick LeStrand, Howard Strauss and their team of researchers as they race to hunt down a mysterious Frenchman who wields Necromantic Death Magic unlike anything they’ve seen before.
Tearing open psychological wounds from Derrick’s past, the cabalistic sorcerer is gathering ancient icons of power to pierce the Veil and bring down the only thing shielding mankind from the relentless horrors beyond.
If they fail, the only questions that will remain are who will live in servitude to the Great Old Ones and who will die…and who will supply Derrick with tacos?
Set against the backdrop of a world where H.P. Lovecraft was not a fiction writer, but a Sweep, a special operative trained to protect the collective sanity of the human race with misinformative blends of fact and fiction … where the Dungeons and Dragons Monster Manual is little more than a slightly skewed Audubon Field Guide, and the monster movies you grew up with are more documentary than not.
It’s Nerdthulhu Lethal Weapon cranked to eleven.
**Release sale- only .99 cents!!**
Guy Riessen is an American author of contemporary dark fiction spanning the science fiction, horror, fantasy and crime genres. Born in South Dakota, he grew up in the Southern California beach town of Huntington Beach. He moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, graduated with a degree in English from UC Berkeley, and has been living in the wild lands north of San Francisco ever since. After nearly two decades of creating artwork in the visual effects industry for feature films, he returned to his first passion: writing speculative fiction.
He's been published on Under the Bed, Near to the Knuckle and Shotgun Honey, and in the anthologies Urban Temples of Cthulhu, Dreams of the Miskatonic and It's All Trumped Up.
Guest Post:
Your book blurb says: “Set against the backdrop of a world where H.P. Lovecraft was not a fiction writer, but a Sweep, a special operative trained to protect the collective sanity of the human race with misinformative blends of fact and fiction.” Can you tell us more about this setting?
Sure! Piercing the Veil’s setting is an exciting twist on the more typical “vampires and monsters are real” concept. In this world, creatures like those monsters are very much real, but much of the fiction, movies, campfire stories about them are misinformation intentionally distributed as “fiction” to hide a truth too horrible for most of humanity to process without going insane. In the world of the Veil, there is a group, DCV, which dates back at least to the creation of the North American colonies and the founding of Miskatonic University. Although the DCV may cross paths with more typical “monsters” their primary concern is to protect the thin Veil of energy which protects our reality from being consumed by the Elder Gods.
H.P. Lovecraft was a member of the disinformation branch of the DCV known as Sweeps—they’re responsible for sweeping the horrible reality back under the rug, so the rest of us can go about our blissfully ignorant lives. The Sweeps are also involved in cleaning sites where Veil tears occur, so they have full control over what evidence is left, what information may pass to the police or even military, and can weave their misinformative propaganda in ways that effectively bury the truth.
One of the coolest things the concept of the Sweeps allows me to do is touch on lots of pop culture, new and old. I loved the “hey I remember that” experience while reading Ready Player One, and I wanted to do something similar, but incorporate it deeply into the actual story. I loved being able to take things from pop culture and make the characters have questioning moments—Hey, was Frankenstein real? Was Mary Shelley a Sweep, or just a fiction writer? What about the first mainstream online roleplaying game, Everquest? Which one of those EQ monsters were Sweep creations, again? I use it for comedy and for more serious mystery-solving because it is fundamental to how everything really works behind what we believe to be “reality.”
Taking the self-referential fun even deeper, there’s a moment when the characters are discussing a story which is clearly referencing Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness, but the differences show Lovecraft the Sweep hiding the truth beneath the fiction. Next month the self-referential fiction steps even deeper when I release the short novel which tells the full story behind the Lovecraft story which hides the real story.
Which begs the question, am I a Sweep? Am I hiding the truth by showing just enough of the true reality and then cloaking it in thrills, horror, and humor? Mwahahah!
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