Shadowed

A novella.
Cover by Daniele Serra.
150 signed/numbered limited edition mini-hardcovers.
Ebook.
Delirium Books.
March 2011.

Currently Out of Print

Synopsis

From the corner of her eye, she sees him: A shadow-man frenetically moving, reaching out for her, yearning. Fear grips Gina Copeland. Her life has been turned upside down by her parents’ recent divorce and a move from her childhood home. Her friends have grown more distant as new friends and interests have come into their lives. The Shadow-Man can’t be real.

Can he? She feels his yearning. His touch mesmerizes. Gina’s loneliness evaporates as she falls into an ethereal seduction that she knows is wrong yet cannot resist. But what’s the worst that can happen? She’s about to find out as she struggles to stop everything she loves from slipping away–or rather, as she struggles to stop herself from slipping away, slipping into the shadows.

Notes from Bill

Shadowed began as a short story called “Shadows Trapped in Yearning,” a title that I’m still fond of while everyone else around me, including my wife, the publisher, the editors, my friends, random people on the street, hates. The original story was written based on an email sent to me by a friend. It had a link to a photograph purportedly taken by a teenage girl. I didn’t want anything to do with the link or the photo. I had just turned on Sarah McLachlan’s CD Fumbling Towards Ecstasy and the first song on the album–one of my favorite McLachlan songs–was “Possession,” which opens with the lines:

Listen as the wind blows from across the great divide
Voices trapped in yearning, memories trapped in time

Well, the song seemed to capture what I wanted to do and I stole the line “Voices trapped in yearning” and changed the Voices to Shadows.

The short story lingered for years and was one that James Beach wanted to include in my collection Catalysts. By that point (in 2005), I knew I wanted to expand the story into a novella. It took nearly five years–and a very tight surprise deadline–to do it, but here it is.

Of course, there was some music I used to get me “in the mood.” Here it is:

  1. “Possession.” Sarah McLachlan (Fumbling Towards Ecstacy)
  2. “Shadowboxer.” Fiona Apple (Tidal)
  3. “Fa Fa.” Guster (Lost and Gone Forever)
  4. “Going Under.” Evanescence (Fallen)
  5. “You Oughta Know.” Alanis Morissette (Jagged Little Pill)
  6. “Bring Me To Life.” Evanescence (Fallen)
  7. “Fallen.” Sarah McLachlan (Afterglow)
  8. “Haunted.” Poe (Haunted)
  9. “Building A Mystery.” Sarah McLachlan (Building A Mystery)

The list has a lot of Sarah McLachlan in it because the feel of her songs–as well as the lyrics–captured the feel I wanted for Shadowed. I’m not sure that I got it right. The songs I tended to lean toward were songs written and performed by women that had to do with loneliness, making mistakes, and outright anger and rage. I’m sure my list could’ve been 100 times larger (at one point, I had well over 100 songs in the iTunes playlist) but these were the ones that seemed to work best.