The Cold Dark Heart of the World

This novel asks two questions:




What is evil? Does evil exist for its own sake? Was evil born with the creation of the Universe? Or is evil nothing more than human behavior taken to its most destructive extremes? Is evil a force or an aberration? The Cold Dark Heart of the World is a story of four strangers who must come together to confront the question of evil as they seek to find a way to defeat Fidget, an entity they will come to believe is driven by hungers older than time, hungers that have never been sated or defeated.




Fidget leaves death in his wake as he moves from the wilds of northern Alberta, Canada to a small community in Montana, from there to El Paso, on to Starkville, Mississippi, and to Valle Crucis in the mountains of North Carolina, finally to Long Beach Island on the Jersey Shore. Shifting shape and persona, Fidget exists to hunt, kill, and devour his prey.




Connected by profession, technology, dreams, intuition, and forces none of them understand, Luna Carnero, a police detective in El Paso, Dexter Malloy, a deputy sheriff in Park County, Montana, Ben Calloway, an Appalachian storyteller/shaman, and Wendy Mapes, a physicist from the Jersey Shore, unite in a stand against Fidget as he prepares to continue his feasting rampage on Long Beach Island.




What is the nature of violence?




Is violence predominantly a matter of testosterone? Fidget appears male. Each of the male characters in The Cold Dark Heart of the World is flawed. Are their flaws of a kind with the evilthat exists as Fidget? Using conventions of the horror novel, the story is an examination of the nature of violence and leaves the reader with a question: Is Ben Calloway a hero, or is he a fool?