As St. Paddy’s Day approaches, THE COLD ONES is slipping into a five-day freebie period on Amazon. (Check it out HERE) Not sure you want to read it? Alright, alright, let me tempt you…
A Story is Born…
I grew up with my grandmother, a staunch Catholic of Irish ancestry, so Saint Patrick was always a very present part of my life. One of the most iconic images associated with him is that of the gray-haired, mitre-wearing bishop pointing at a small “herd” of snakes, the implication being that he drove them out. Now we know, based on scientific evidence, that there never were any actual snakes in Ireland… some kind of Ice Age glitch that spared the Emerald Isle from these slinky residents. Some claim it was always meant to be a metaphor for driving out the “evils of paganism”… but I started thinking in a fantasy story vein… what if the serpents driven out of Ireland were a different kind of evil? What if the most revered and respected cultural icon of Ireland faced something more terrible, and had to fight side-by-side with those of the Old Ways to defeat it?
And that’s when THE COLD ONES was born…
The monster could have been a human… once. Its head was hairless, and even in the darkness there was a reflective glow to its skin… a white glow, bloodless, lifeless. Oh, but it was most definitely alive, though perhaps not in the sense that we are. Its eyes were black empty spots on its head, as if the eyeballs themselves had been scooped out, leaving nothing but the nearly-smooth crater where they had once been. The nose was almost non-existent, nothing but two slots I assumed served as nostrils. The most terrifying portion of the face, however, was the mouth… A gaping chasm of teeth, rows upon rows, all surrounded by tube-like tentacles, as if sea anemones had thought the creature’s mouth to be an ocean tide pool and decided to settle in on its rim. Four longer fangs protruded from the top and bottom of the mouth, and they were as sharp as needles by the look of them. — Excerpt from THE COLD ONES
GABRIELLA MESSINA WRITES 