Eidolon Avenue: The Second 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 sequel to Eidolon Avenue: The First Feast (“a great read...powerful and jarring” - Cemetery Dance) returns to the voracious Eidolon as it savors The Second Feast.
A narcoleptic man in apartment 2A battles a vengeful past determined to rob him of everything as he runs from the barbaric disaster of a delusional love. A woman in 2B, reinventing herself to please a callous boyfriend, discovers the horrors that wait in the shadows of her self-renovation. The man in 2C, a teacher at the nearby Catholic girl’s school, collapses beneath the brutal consequences of his lecherous desires. An older woman in 2D, after decades dedicated to the church, is cornered at last by the grisly carnage beating at the hollow center of her faith. And a college student in 2E, hungry to escape an ignored life of invisible anonymity, finds herself captured between the pages of a ravenous book.
All thrown into their own private hell as every cruel choice, every drop of spilled blood, every silent, complicit moment of cowardice is remembered, resurrected and relived to feed the ancient evil that lives on Eidolon Avenue.
Proudly represented by Crystal Lake Publishing - Tales from The Darkest Depths.
Interview with the author:
What makes this Horror short story collection so special?
Winn: There’s something incredibly creepy about the thought of a building calling souls home. Not people who know each other or have anything in common, save their address and living on the same floor. But people who have tortured pasts and deep wounding. Who have stumbled away from cataclysmic mistakes in an attempt to escape consequence. And now, here, on Eidolon Avenue, they’re going to take a breath, rest, perhaps build a new life. But it’d been waiting for them, the building. Knowing their stories, familiar with their ghosts, aware of their failings and sins. As a writer, there’s something fantastically freeing about that premise. The possibilities are endless. What they did and how they’re going to suffer, really, you can just do so much with that.
Tell us more about your lead characters.
Winn: Well, I have five lead characters each with their own tale to tell. And they’re as different from each other as night and day. What they do have in common, though is an awareness of the immense weight of their guilt and a foreknowing, if you will, that their journey has come to a close. So even if the end is shocking and swift and they’d hoped to escape just one more time, they somehow get that it was time.
Why should readers give this series a try?
Winn: The great thing about Eidolon Avenue is, within one book, the reader has five new stories to discover. New characters, new situations, new sins and mistakes, new consequences all wrapped up within a complete narrative with the only thing linking these five disparate souls together being the building they live in and the floor they live on. So, for a writer, the creativity I get to tap into to make the stories as different and memorable as possible is a heck of a lot of fun. You just never know how lives are going to crumble and collapse as you move from neighbor to neighbor.