Eidolon Avenue: The First Feast by Jonathan Winn
Eidolon Avenue: Where the secretly guilty go to die.
One building. Five floors. Five doors per floor. Twenty-five nightmares feeding the hunger lurking between the bricks and waiting beneath the boards.
The First Feast. A retired Chinese assassin in apartment 1A fleeing from a lifetime of bloodshed. A tattooed man in 1B haunted by his most dangerous regret. A frat boy serial killer in 1C facing his past and an elderly married couple stumbling and wounded from fifty years of failed murder/suicide pacts in 1D. And, finally, a young girl in 1E whose quiet thoughts unleash unspeakable horror.
All thrown into their own private hell as every cruel choice, every deadly mistake, every drop of spilled blood is remembered, resurrected and relived to feed the ancient evil that lives on Eidolon Avenue.
Interview with the author:
Q: So what makes Eidolon Avenue so special?
Jonathan: A collection of five shorts taking place in five apartments on the same floor of the same building. So, as a reader, there's the necessary luxury of being locked onto one space, which gives you an anchor, so to speak, but, as the writer, I’m allowed the freedom to create five different nightmares. And even though they happen next door to each other—an idea I love—they need not be like each other, you know? As a reader, you finish the story for the first apartment, turn the page to the second apartment and, kept safe by the anchor of the building, find yourself thrown into a whole new, unexpected, surprising world.
Q: Tell us more about your lead characters.
Jonathan: There really is just one lead character whose shadow darkens everything: the building.
And who is the building? The building is relentless. And greedy. It calls to it the wounded, the lost, the guilty, the depraved. It embraces the desperate and the abandoned, offering them for a brief moment the dishonest safety of “home” and then digs deep. Burrows in. Knocks down the barriers to feast on the shameful memories tucked in those forgotten corners of the mind. Gnaws on the tender spots waiting beneath the muscle, the sinew, the bone. Feeds on their secrets, their guilt, their failings and mistakes. Rips from them the most sensitive of their psychological underpinnings and uses them to weaken the body, cloud the mind and destroy the soul. With each story, book by book, the building, even if unseen and silent, is the lead character driving the narrative.
Q: Why should readers give this shared-world collection a try?
Jonathan: Essentially it’s five books in one. Each story has its own distinctive voice driven by its own unique, multi-faceted character. And every character is completely different than the character before as well as the one that follows. They all linger in different ways long after you’ve reached the end of their story. Furthermore, one of the strengths of Eidolon Avenue is the push-pull of each character’s struggle. Yes, they’ve made mistakes, destroyed lives, insisted on following through with atrocious decisions and they’re most definitely paying for all of that now.
But you also see the doubt, the regret, the knowledge of what they’ve done wrong and what could have been done differently. The need to apologize and the desire to be forgiven and to forgive themselves. So there’s a journey, an emotional journey, with each story. Wrapped in all the darkness and horrifying retribution is human emotion and a very real human awareness of what’s happening and why.
Proudly brought to you by Crystal Lake Publishing - Tales from the Darkest Depths