©doWNloaD. Caliban: Giants in the Earth - 2014 ABNA Entry PDF by Tony Simmons

Caliban: Giants in the Earth - 2014 ABNA Entry

Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award (ABNA) Entry - this eBook is a sample of the first 3,000-5,000 words; it is not the full book. The ABNA contest is operated on Amazon.com only. Visit this entry on Amazon.com to leave customer feedback. To vote for the Grand Prize winner starting July 8, visit www.amazon.com/ABNA. Ritualistic murders of children in rural South Alabama bring FBI profiler Gabriel Street and British occultist Sir Arthur Magus to the small town of Junction, just as a young woman seeks shelter on her estranged father’s farm. Rebecca Caliban is pregnant, tormented by the belief that something in the shape of her dead husband came to her in the night, loved her, and left her with child. Rebecca descends into madness and suicide as the investigators combine forces to battle the killer, soon revealed as an ageless changeling creature that preys upon the innocent in service to a forgotten god. Rebecca’s child, Tom, survives her death and is raised by his firm but loving grandfather, Jonathan Maxwell, descendant of a line of Creek medicine chiefs. Plagued by dark forces and haunted by his mother’s betrayal, Tom comes of age even as the changeling resurfaces, and Tom discovers the truth: The creature raped Rebecca to hasten the birth of a magic-wielder whose sacrifice could release a Great Old One, a souleater, from its crystalline prison under the earth. A thousand years ago, one of Jonathan’s ancestors confined the souleater, and the changeling has since manipulated the Caliban and Maxwell lineage to produce Tom, whose blood will set its god free. But Street and Magus, the forces of law and order, have watched for the changeling’s return, and they come to Junction’s rescue after Tom’s sacrifice on the altar of a deconsecrated church releases the souleater. Tunneling up from its deep cell, the Old One rises to devour the living and summons Junction’s restless spirits to feed its age-old hunger. Street and Magus rush to the Maxwell family’s sacred grove, and with a spectral Tom Caliban, harness elemental forces in a desperate last stand against ancient evil.