Tempest, Tennessee

Publisher Marketing: We open on a day as hot as a branding iron, a day meant for swimming or barbecuing or fishing. Hell, all three in a perfect world, but in this one, Johnny Yates decides for the latter. It's a grand day, and although the fish aren't jumping, he has his beer and a thick novel on Elvis, and two for three is a good thing when you get to Johnny's age. But Johnny's day is about to get worse, however. Much worse, for beneath the lake swims something that has come from another planet, through a small cut in the fabric of our universe, and into our reality, on a singular mission to take our planet, void it of all of its current inhabitants, and claim it for its own kind, who are suffering and dying on their home planet. It has just arrived, and it is about to use Johnny as it's first piece in the year-long conquest it had set up prior to coming here. You see, it has a very special power: whatever it is you love the most, it will turn into (be it Elvis Presley, slinking out of the lake and toward your boat, or Angelina Jolie, whom you may harbor a secret love and lust for, or perhaps it is your wife or husband or the person you're having an affair with . . . it may even become the personification of whatever vice you have tied your life too [Mama White, the personification of Cocaine]) and once you see it in it's disguise, it is very hard to not be mesmerized, to not be pulled under its control, to not do what it bids, when it bids it. "It," however, is a SHE, and she has come along with one other, her "background support," which just so happens to be her brother . . . but, unbeknownst to her, her brother--who has lived in her shadow for too long--has goals of his own, and so in this novel you have these two beings who come from the same team but who have different ideas on going about their mission, and the poor, hapless individuals in the town of Tempest, who must deal with this invasion in the best way they possibly can. It's an alien invasion story in microcosm, and it stays that way all the way through, with tight (and nuanced) characterizations, where good and evil is nothing but a perspective that changes depending on whose lens we are peering through. Peppered throughout are: ideas on religion, addictions, the laces through which families are connected or destroyed, death of others as a segue into personal bravery or cowardice, etc