Trying to launch a book while chaos is swirling around you has been an interesting experience. I am so glad that I have these local connections to my story. I hope these photos and insights are interesting to others.

This was the Athens Lunatic Asylum and it is a Kirkbride building. Kirkbride’s heart and intentions were good. He wanted to have a beautiful space for the mentally ill to help them heal (compared to standards of care in the 1800s) He truly succeeded here. More about that in a minute.

This building is now an art center for Ohio University and yes it’s supposedly haunted (something some locals want to downplay) so Josh takes Brendan here.

When it started, this place did good work (it later got overcrowded and was a hot bed of the icepick lobotomy craze so yeah, didn’t stay good) One detail that does make the book are the windows. If you look close at the next picture you can see the scrollwork to make it look nice but they are security bars. Kirkbride didn’t want it to look like a prison.

Another part that made the novel and one that I’ll put here as today’s snippet is the graveyard of unmarked and mostly forgotten graves. So many families never came back for them.

Snippet –

Brendan stared at his feet, toes near a cracked, small, boxy headstone bearing only a number. “They didn’t even give them names, not even in death,” he murmured. Josh swallowed hard. He hadn’t planned to bring Brendan to the Ridges Cemetery when he drove up to the old asylum. Josh didn’t want to stir up shit memories. Drinks at the coffee house had gone well. Brendan didn’t fuss at all as Josh helped him put the sites he most wanted to see in a logical order for them to visit.

And finally a glimpse of the gorgeous cover it has!

Blurb:

Young wildlife conservation professor, Joshua Zimmerman, adores foxes, steampunk, and paranormal investigation. As a geek of the first order, Josh is a collector of nerdy memorabilia and tattoos, and he’s an avid steampunk cosplayer. When his favorite author hires him for some ghost hunting for his new project, Josh can hardly believe his luck.

As an author of the wildly successful urban fantasy series, The Green Tablet, Brendan Halloran should have it all. And he did until his young son, Connor, died of cancer. Heartbroken and drowning in grief, Brendan stops writing, stops living his life. His marriage has disintegrated, leaving Brendan trapped in the moment Connor died.

When Brendan rents a cabin in Ohio’s Hocking Hills, it’s ostensibly to research his next book, an adult paranormal tale. Brendan hires a local professor who is an expert on the paranormal, thinking if he does pull out of his tail spin and makes good on his plan to write a new book, he might as well do it right. And the perfect place to investigate could be the remains of an old hotel constructed to suit the serial killer who built it.

Brendan finds himself swept away, completely unprepared for the joy and enthusiasm Josh brings to everything he does. Step by step, Brendan reenters life. His head might not be convinced he’s ready to love again, but his heart disagrees. Unfortunately for him, the ghost is every bit as vicious as the killer was in life, and he and Joshua have a target on their backs.

order Link: https://ninestarpress.com/product/these-haunted-hills/

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