Hi guys guess what, I have an Excerpt of The Book of Paul for you today, ive´heard great things about this book, but haven´thad the chance to read it yet. but I will,I surely will =D
Anyway pls check out the excerpt it sounds intereting and afterwards what about enteringthe HUGE!!!! giveaway Richard Long have for you.
An Excerpt from The Book of Paul
Exercises
He practiced smiling.
Looking in the mirror, Martin pulled up the corners
of his mouth, trying to duplicate the expression of the blond-haired man on the
TV with the big forehead. Something wasn’t right—the eyebrows? His eyes darted
back and forth f rom the mirror to the television, posing, making adjustments
here and there…lips down, more teeth…comparing…nope. After a few minutes, his
face started to hurt and he gave up.
He did push-ups instead. Push-ups were easy. He did
two hundred before he had to stop and change the channel. A show called The
Nanny had come on and he leapt up like a cat as soon as he heard her whiny
voice. He pressed the remote button with blinding speed-click, click, click,
click, click-until he found an old black-and-white movie. Good. He liked those.
He went back to his push-ups, his face tilted up so he wouldn’t miss a thing.
In the movie there was a woman who was worried that
this man didn’t love her anymore. She didn’t know it, but the man was worried
that the woman didn’t love him either. They spent all this time (he couldn’t
even count how many push-ups) trying to make each other jealous, hoping that
would make the other one love them again. Martin didn’t understand any of it.
He looked at them laughing and smiling while they tried to trick and embarrass
each other, then went to the mirror and practiced again.
It still didn’t look right.
Pretty
Birds were chirping, dogs were barking. It was a
bright, bright beautiful
cool crisp day in the neighborhood. Junkies were up with their crackhead cousins, prowling the lanes of Tompkins Square Park, looking for a not quite empty vial to suck on or maybe a john so they could buy one. The gentry joggers were up already, circling the park in huffy, puffy laps, their pounding hoofbeats echoing the clang-whirl-shwoop-crunch of the mob- owned garbage trucks.
cool crisp day in the neighborhood. Junkies were up with their crackhead cousins, prowling the lanes of Tompkins Square Park, looking for a not quite empty vial to suck on or maybe a john so they could buy one. The gentry joggers were up already, circling the park in huffy, puffy laps, their pounding hoofbeats echoing the clang-whirl-shwoop-crunch of the mob- owned garbage trucks.
Ho-hum. Rose slowly fingered the ring on her nipple
and wondered why she couldn’t get back to sleep. The garbage trucks were the
obvious reason. The booms and bangs down below sounded like artillery fire.
Still, she usually slept like a pile of cannonballs at Gettysburg. When she
went down, she stayed down. At least until noon. She worked nights at the tat-
too parlor, happily infecting all the ink-crazed kids with HIV and hepatitis C
(if they were lucky). She didn’t realize she was doing that. She’d been
following the sterilization techniques handed down by her creepy boss.
Unfortunately, they weren’t any more effective than the jar of clear blue
liquid that the barbershop used to sterilize combs. In the time she’d been
working, she had already been responsible for the possibly fatal infection of
eleven pierced and tattooed members of the “tribal community.”
So Rose, blissfully unaware of her crimes against
humanity, lay wide awake at nine-fifteen in the morning, twisting and turning
her nipple ring. She wasn’t sure why she was awake, but now that she was, she
knew what she wanted to do about it. As she rubbed the two silver rings that
held her clit hostage, she wondered again why she was up so early and why she
felt so…horny? Hungry? What?
She knocked off a quick O like she was popping a
wine cork, light and charming but nothing special. That’s when she realized it
wasn’t a sex thing. So what was it?
She gripped the rings on both nipples and stretched them upward as far as she could, dragging her small twin mounds along like a pair of stub- born mules. She pulled and pulled until her nipples ached, then held the rings at the Maximum Stretching Point, feeling the pain course through her, then settle back down again. She didn’t back off even a millimeter, just took some deep slow breaths for a moment or two and tried to pull them out even farther.
She gripped the rings on both nipples and stretched them upward as far as she could, dragging her small twin mounds along like a pair of stub- born mules. She pulled and pulled until her nipples ached, then held the rings at the Maximum Stretching Point, feeling the pain course through her, then settle back down again. She didn’t back off even a millimeter, just took some deep slow breaths for a moment or two and tried to pull them out even farther.
She thought of a dancer doing hamstring stretches,
and she figured the technique and level of pain must be fairly equivalent. After
slowly yanking them out again, she thought, I’m in training, and started
giggling so hard she had to let go. Thwack. Her tiny tits and sore, swollen
nipples bounced back against her chest like a pair of hard rubber balls. Boing.
Giggle. Ho- hum. Hmmm. So it wasn’t the sex and it wasn’t the pain or the
sexpain or the painsex. So what was it? She looked out the window at the blue
morn- ing sky and the green bushy trees and the squirrel tightrope-walking on
the fire escape and the cling-clang of the garbage truck and…
She was happy. She was unreasonably, deliriously
happy! But why? The “why” brought a tiny frown to her tiny face, but the
“happy” was so much stronger that it brushed away the “why” with a single gust
of cool fresh air that came blowing through her curtains.
She threw the covers off the bed and let the breeze
wash over her until her skin was a textured roadmap of goose bumps, pits,
posts, rings and colored ink. She breathed and the ink breathed with her. She
sat on the edge of the bed and jingled like Donner and Blitzen. She smiled and
she looked out the window and knew something good was coming her way.
Rose stood up and stretched and took a deep breath
and yawned and padded into the hallway where her yoga mat was waiting. She
spent the next half hour going through her routine, a rare carryover of the
training and discipline that dominated her preadolescent life as a competitive
gym- nast. She could do headstands and handstands and down facing dogs like
nobody’s business. In fact, it took some fairly severe contortions for her to
even break a sweat, but by the final lotus pose, a slippery sheen of
perspiration coated her arms and chest.
She sniffed her armpits, bowed to the altar at the
end of the hall and lit three candles. The candles were nestled between a
variety of crystals and minerals, some so brightly colored she often wondered
how something that vibrant and wondrous could actually be growing like a plant
on the walls of caves in total darkness. Or like her amethyst geode, actually
growing inside a rock, like an egg hatching a million-year-old purple crystal
baby. Her favorite gemstone was one her mom gave her, a brilliant red crystal
she called a bloodstone. Its smooth, squarish surface was easily five inches
across and three inches thick, one of the largest of its kind, she’d been told.
She rubbed it for good luck like she did almost every day, then pranced into
the bathroom for a very long, very hot shower.
She hummed a happy song while she soaped and
scrubbed and rubbed and shaved and shaved and shaved. She wasn’t sure what the
song was or where she’d heard it before. After three more humming choruses, it
suddenly came to her and she could see Natalie Wood dancing in that dress shop,
looking in the mirror while the other girls scolded her for being so silly.
Rose looked in her defogging shower mirror, liked what she saw and sang out
right along with them, “I feel pretty…oh, so pretty…”
Monsters
You tell your children not to be afraid. You tell
them everything will be
all right. You tell them Mommy and Daddy will always be there. You tell them lies.
Paul looked out the filthy window and watched the little girl playing in the filthier street below. Hopscotch. He didn’t think kids played hop- scotch anymore. Not in this neighborhood. Hip-hopscotch, maybe.
all right. You tell them Mommy and Daddy will always be there. You tell them lies.
Paul looked out the filthy window and watched the little girl playing in the filthier street below. Hopscotch. He didn’t think kids played hop- scotch anymore. Not in this neighborhood. Hip-hopscotch, maybe.
“Hhmph! What do you think about that?”
Paul watched the little black girl toss her pebble
or cigarette butt or whatever it was to square number five, then expertly hop,
hop, hop her way safely to the square and back. She was dressed in a clean,
fresh, red-ging- ham dress with matching red bows in her neatly braided
pigtails. She looked so fresh and clean and happy that he wondered what she was
doing on this shithole street.
The girl was playing all by herself. Hop, hop, hop.
Hop, hop, hop. She was completely absorbed in her hopping and scotching and
Paul was equally absorbed watching every skip and shuffle. No one walked by and
only a single taxi ruffled the otherworldly calm.
Paul leaned closer, his keen ears straining to pick
up the faint sound of her shiny leather shoes scraping against the grimy
concrete. He focused even more intently and heard the even fainter lilt of her
soft voice. Was she singing? He pressed his ear against the glass and listened.
Sure enough, she was singing. Paul smiled and closed his eyes and let the sound
pour into his ear like a rich, fragrant wine.
“One, two, buckle my shoe. Three, four, shut the
door…”
He listened with his eyes closed. Her soft sweet
voice rose higher and higher until…the singing suddenly stopped. Paul’s eyes
snapped open. The girl was gone. He craned his neck quickly to the left and saw
her being pulled roughly down the street. The puller was a large, light-skinned
black man, tugging on her hand/arm every two seconds like he was dragging a dog
by its leash. At first, he guessed that the man was her father, a commodity as
rare in this part of town as a fresh-scrubbed girl playing hop- scotch. Then he
wondered if he wasn’t her father after all. Maybe he was one of those kinds of
men, one of those monsters that would take a sweet, pure thing to a dark, dirty
place and…
And do whatever a monster like that wanted to do.
Paul pressed his face against the glass and caught a
last fleeting glance of the big brown man and the tiny red-checkered girl. He
watched the way he yanked on her arm, how he shook his finger, how he stooped
down to slap her face and finally concluded that he was indeed her one and only
Daddy dear. Who else would dare to act that way in public?
“Kids!” Paul huffed. “The kids these days!”
He laughed loud enough to rattle the windows. Then
his face hard- ened by degrees as he pictured the yanking daddy and the
formally happy girl. Hmmm, maybe he was one of those prowling monsters after
all. Paul shuddered at the thought of what a man like that would do. He
imagined the scene unfolding step by step, grunting as the vision became more
and more precise. “Hhmph!” he snorted after a particularly gruesome imagining.
“What kind of a bug could get inside your brain and make you do a thing like
that?”
“Monsters! Monsters!” he shouted, rambling back into
the wasteland of his labyrinthine apartments, twisting and turning through the
maze of lightless hallways as if being led by a seeing-eye dog. He walked and
turned and walked some more, comforted as always by the darkness. Finally, he
came to a halt and pushed hard against a wall.
His hidden sanctuary opened like Ali Baba’s cave,
glowing with the treasures it contained. He stepped inside and saw the figure
resting (well, not exactly resting) between the flickering candles. At the
sound of his footsteps, the body on the altar twitched frantically. Paul moved
closer, rubbing a smooth fingertip across the wet, trembling skin and raised it
to his lips. It tasted like fear. He gazed down at the man, his eyes moving
slowly from his ashen face to the rusty nails holding him so firmly in place.
The warm, dark blood shining on the wooden altar
made him think about the red-gingham bunny again.
“Monsters,” he said, more softly this time, wishing
he weren’t so busy. As much as he would enjoy it, there simply wasn’t enough
time to clean up this mess, prepare for his guests and track her down. Well,
not her, precisely. Her angry tugging dad. Not that Paul had any trouble
killing little girls, you understand. It just wasn’t his thing. Given a choice,
he would much rather kill her father.
And make her watch.
The
Book of Paul is the first of seven volumes in a sweeping
mythological narrative tracing the mystical connections between Hermes Trismegistus
in ancient Egypt, Sophia, the female counterpart of Christ, and the Celtic
druids of Clan Kelly.
About The Book of Paul
“Never alive…and
never dead…”
In the
rubble-strewn wasteland of Alphabet City, a squalid tenement conceals a
treasure “beyond all imagining”—an immaculately preserved, fifth century codex.
The sole repository of ancient Hermetic lore, it contains the authentic
alchemical rituals for transforming thought into substance, transmuting matter
at will…and attaining eternal life.
When a lusty,
East Village tattoo artist has a torrid encounter with a battle-hardened loner,
they are overwhelmed by the intensity of their feelings. Rose and Martin
soon discover they are unwitting pawns on opposing sides of a battle that has
shaped the course of human history. At the center of the conflict is
Paul, the villainous overlord of an underground feudal society, who guards the
book’s occult secrets in preparation for the fulfillment of an apocalyptic
prophecy.
The action is
relentless as Martin and Rose fight to escape Paul’s clutches and Martin’s
destiny as the chosen recipient of Paul’s sinister legacy. Science and
magic, mythology and technology converge in a monumental battle where the
stakes couldn’t be higher: control of the ultimate power in the universe—the
Maelstrom.
About the author
Richard Long
writes to exorcize the demons of his past and manifest the dreams of his
future.
He started life
in the school of hard knocks and worked to create his own rags to riches story
of troubled kid turned successful advertising executive.
His debut novel,
The Book of Paul, is a dark, thrilling, and psychologically rich
supernatural horror/thriller that blends mythology, science and mystery into a
page-turning addiction.
Richard is also
writing a YA novel, The Dream Palace, primarily so that his children
could read his books.
He lives in
Manhattan with his wife, two amazing children and their wicked black cat,
Merlin.
Connect
with Richard on the following links:
Website:
Facebook:
Twitter:
Goodreads:
Thanks for posting the big Book of Paul giveaway. Hope your followers win big!
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