Bestselling multi-genre fiction author Mitzi Szereto returns with an eerie, gritty, gory and raunchy tale of death and revenge in Florida Gothic, the first of an all-new series of horror novels!
Advance
praise for FLORIDA GOTHIC
“Mitzi
Szereto’s dark night of the soul is one wild, soul-blasting old
mother of a trip, plus maggots, cockroaches, and cocaine. Solid,
slippery, bug-eyed fun.”—Peter Straub, Interior
Darkness: Selected Stories
Blurb
Stuck
in a twilight world between life and death…
A
hit-and-run driver leaves Ernesto Martinez to die by a Miami canal.
Then an alligator comes along to finish the job.
Being
dead gives Ernesto plenty of time to think. He thinks about his wife,
taken from him too soon by illness. He thinks about his daughter, the
victim of a drunk driver. He thinks about his death as he watches his
body slowly decompose.
Most
of all, he thinks about injustice.
The
meth head ex-con living in the Everglades. The judge enjoying
retirement on the Gulf Coast. The son of a Colombian drug kingpin
partying in South Beach. These men care nothing for the pain they’ve
caused. But they’ll soon know what it is to feel pain.
Set
against the sweltering bug-infested backdrop of South Florida,
Florida Gothic
weaves a darkly unnerving and visceral tale of sex, drugs, crime and
vengeance.
(Book
#1 in The “Gothic” Series of standalone horror novels from Mitzi
Szereto.)
Excerpt
Dusk
spreads its steamy cloak over Ernesto’s Little Havana neighborhood.
Watchtower pamphlets lie scattered on the rubber welcome mat along
with pieces of junk mail that fell out of his mailbox. The pile also
contains a soggy notice from the post office informing him that his
mail will be held at his local branch for thirty days, after which
it’ll be returned to the sender if not picked up. The notice is
dated three weeks after Ernesto’s death.
It
feels strange leaving the house.
Ernesto
pauses on his front porch, listening. The neighborhood offers all its
usual sounds: dogs barking, children playing, people bickering in
Spanish. The steady hum of traffic coming from Southwest Eighth
Street is suddenly interrupted by the blast of a car horn, followed
by an angry shout. “¡Cabrón!”
Everything’s pretty much as it should be…
…Except
for Ernesto, who doesn’t belong here among the living. But other
than his missing arm and mangled leg, he seems to be in better shape
than ever. His hearing’s sharper and so is his eyesight, which,
prior to his death, was in a depressing state of decline. Even in the
fading daylight he can see things clearly—the letters and numbers
on the license plate of Gonzalo Hernandez’s Ford parked across the
street; the rain-blurred type on the post office notification lying
on the doormat; even the phone number on the lost dog flyer stapled
to the electricity pole. It never occurred to him that being dead
would have so many benefits.
Taking
a deep breath to fill non-functioning lungs, Ernesto leaves the
safety of his front porch and merges with the thickening dusk. He
walks with a lopsided gait, his damaged right leg dragging behind him
like an appendage that doesn’t belong to him, yet still insists on
being there. His pace is slow, but determined. He doesn’t think
about where he’s going. His feet have a mind of their own as they
lead him farther away from his street and his neighborhood. A troop
of palmetto bugs trail behind him like foot soldiers, their wings
clicking with excitement. Like Ernesto, they’re also tired of being
cooped up in the house.
Soon
Ernesto finds himself back in familiar territory. Here the
streetlights are less likely to function due to the occasional
bullet. Here the residents lock themselves inside their homes after
sundown, too frightened to go out or speak to their neighbors unless
they share the same skin color. Here the children don’t play in
their yards and are instead confined to their bedrooms. This isn’t
a friendly or welcoming place. If his sense of smell still
functioned, Ernesto would notice that it even smells different here,
though that might be the canal, which stinks of more decay than
usual, like the inside of an old crypt no one ever visits.
Suddenly
he hears voices. Their brusque and jerky cadences are jarring, at
times aggressive. Usually when Ernesto hears voices like these he
gets frightened and goes in the opposite direction. But tonight he
feels no fear.
Buy
links:
Amazon
Australia: https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B06ZZ6QCXN/
Amazon
Mexico: https://www.amazon.com.mx/dp/B06ZZ6QCXN/
Amazon
India: https://www.amazon.in/dp/B06ZZ6QCXN
Barnes
& Noble:
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/florida-gothic-mitzi-szereto/1126637298?ean=2940158585043
Kobo
Store: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/florida-gothic
About
the Author
Mitzi
Szereto is an author and anthology editor of multi-genre fiction and
non-fiction. She has her own blog of humorous essays at Errant
Ramblings: Mitzi Szereto’s Weblog and
the web TV channel Mitzi TV, which
covers the “quirky” side of London, England. Her books include
Oysters and Pearls: Collected
Stories; Phantom:
The Immortal (co-authored with
Ashley Lister); Rotten Peaches (The
Thelonious T. Bear Chronicles) and
Normal for Norfolk (The Thelonious T.
Bear Chronicles)—the cozy mystery
series co-authored with celebrity author bear Teddy Tedaloo; The
Wilde Passions of Dorian Gray; Pride
and Prejudice: Hidden Lusts; Dying
for It: Tales of Sex and Death;
Thrones of Desire: Erotic Tales of
Swords, Mist and Fire;
Getting Even: Revenge Stories and
Love, Lust and Zombies.
Her anthology Erotic Travel Tales 2
is the first anthology of erotica to
feature a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She divides her
time between the Pacific Northwest and the UK.
Author
links:
Mitzi
Szereto website: http://mitziszereto.com
Twitter:
https://twitter.com/MitziSzereto
