Venturing Into a Different Genre

This past weekend, I published something very different from my other works. With Halloween approaching, I decided to write and publish a horror story. That may sound about as far from my usual military historical fiction as one can get. But perhaps not.

Why would I choose to write horror? I have been fascinated by the genre since I was a child. My mother loved horror films, and our whole family went to the movies together. Like Cosby’s Fat Albert and his buddies, I used to crouch behind the seats and peer between them to watch the scary scenes. I remember watching Lon Chaney Jr.’s face change from that of a man to that of a wolf through time-lapse photography. I recall the mummy’s ghost carrying Ramsay Ames into the swamp until they disappeared.  I saw David Carradine, in my opinion the best Dracula, turn to dust when caught by the sunlight. We also saw all the horror anthologies like Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman and Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein. A latecomer to the scene was The Creature From the Black Lagoon.

About the time I became a teenager, an amazing comic book series (actually short graphic novels) called Tales from the Crypt appeared on the market. The werewolves, vampires, and other monsters in these books were convincingly drawn, and the stories were spine tingling. Unfortunately (for fans of the series) someone convinced the publisher that he was contributing to juvenile delinquency, so he pulled the plug on the books. Some years later, the title was revived on a TV series.

My new story, The Passage and the Tomb: A Tale of Ancient Horror, takes place in Egypt in the early 1800s. My characters are soldiers and scientists from Napoleon’s invading army. Okay, so I can’t really suppress the historical novelist in me. Napoleon’s savants studied and documented the ancient Egyptian civilization for several years. They essentially invented Egyptology. What better foils to confront an ancient evil than the explorers who opened up the longest lasting civilization to the world?

Inadvertently, my characters free a 4,000-year-old werewolf who had been entombed alive by the ancients.  Will modern firearms protect them? Or is the power of the timeless monster too great to overcome? Read my story to find out.

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Warren Bell is an author of historical fiction.  He spent 29 years as a US Naval Officer, and has traveled to most of the places in the world that he writes about.  A long-time World War II-buff, his first two novels, Fall Eagle One and Hold Back the Sun are set during World War II.  His third novel, Asphalt and Blood, follows the US Navy Seabees in Vietnam.  His most recent novel, Snowflakes in July, was released on Kindle on September 15, 2015, and a paperback version will be following.  For more about Warren Bell, visit his website at: wbellauthor.com or see him on twitter @wbellauthor.  

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