Mayhem explodes when monsters mix with guns, rednecks and beer. Craig Nybo's second novel, Small Town Monsters, visits the town of DePalma Beach, Montana, a peaceful lake community with a five-star rating in any tour travel guide. Monster hunter isn't in the job description when Kurt McCammus, a Los Angeles homicide detective, leaves the big city and all its violence behind to take a job as chief of police in DePalma Beach. He falls in love with the clean air and peaceful community. That is until a local rancher finds 50 head of sheep mutilated on his spread. The people of DePalma Beach turn to superstitions, believing that monsters have caused the mutilations. Chupacabras, bigfoot, aliens, werewolves, and wendigos all make the suspect list. Kurt must get to the bottom of the mutilations while keeping the good ol' boys of DePalma Beach from hitting the woods all liquored up for a monster hunt. The pressure escalates when bodies begin to stack up. As Kurt investigates the murders, even his sense of reason wavers. Could it be true that DePalma Beach is crawling with monsters?
Author's Note
When I wrote Small Town Monsters, I wanted to get back to the basics of gothic horror. Shortly before writing this novel, I found myself revisiting classic horror stories such as Mary Shelly's Frankenstein and Bram Stoker's Dracula. In Bram Stoker's work in particular, I found a visceral terror that I haven't seen emulated in recent fiction. It seems that readers are are drawn to the humanity of monsters. We want to see them act like people. We want to live next door to them. We want to have love affairs with them.
Not so with the werewolves of Montana found in my novel, Small Town Monsters. These werewolves--monsters in the dark--behave more like forces of nature, enormous, hungry, visceral. It takes an intrepid monster hunter to go out into the night when such a monster calls. If you are after werewolves with class and poise, monsters who might have a softer, more human side, go somewhere else. In Small Town Monsters, its all about fear and intensity. If you enjoy scary books as much as I do, welcome to the small town of DePalma Beach the setting of my story. Here, there be monsters. Happy reading and even happier dreams.
