Happy new year, dear reader,
2016 already! I don’t know about you, but I can hardly believe it. The last year seems to have just flown by.
Based on what my friends tell me (not to mention the general trends in their Facebook feeds) it seems that a lot of people are glad to be done with 2015. It was certainly a rollercoaster year for me, but if I concentrate only on the high points, it brought a lot to smile about.
Starting with the books…my first novel, The Beast of Mysore, came out in July. Reviews have been very positive, and mixing the genres of vampirism and the Napoleonic wars was a great deal of fun to do. Its sequel, Goddess of the Dead, came out in November. It was a more complex book to write, with a much bigger body count, and ends on quite the cliffhanger. Book III in the Wellington Undead series, tentatively titled The Company of Shadows, will be released next spring.
My other fiction series, The Deadseer Chronicles, concerns the adventures of a teenage psychic medium. The first book, Agonal Breath, puts our hero and his friends in a haunted, abandoned old tuberculosis sanatorium in the mountains of Colorado. These books are intended for a Young Adult audience (minimal swears, lots of scares) and hit #23 in Amazon UK’s YA Ghost fiction chart, I’m very pleased to say. I’m currently hard at work on the second book in the series, Last Halloween, which will be released early next year.
On the non-fiction front, Haunted Longmont was released in August by The History Press. It’s doing well on both sides of the pond, which is surprising for a book about small-town American hauntings. The first volume of my autobiography, In Search of the Paranormal, came out just a few weeks later. It relates cases from almost twenty years of paranormal investigation on both sides of the Atlantic, including some which turned out to be rather more peculiar than a simple haunting. I took great pleasure in walking into my local branch of Barnes and Noble Booksellers just before Christmas, found copies of both these books, and stealth-signed them.
So what’s next? Coming in January 2016 is The World’s Most Haunted Hospitals. I just received the author copies of this book in the mail, and I’m very pleased with the work the publisher put it on it. So many people helped with it, in the form of interviews and support, and it recounts ghost stories from asylums, hospitals, and healthcare facilities from all around the globe. Talking to doctors, nurses, and of course the paranormal investigators, was an absolute delight, and I hope that you enjoy reading the book as much as I enjoyed writing and researching it.
Schiffer Books have asked me for a book on the Colorado UFO scene, which I will need to have done in July for a Fall 2016 release, if all goes well. My Halloween book this year is for the publisher of Haunted Hospitals, and will be an in-depth exploration of one of the cases covered in that book: tentatively titled The Haunting of Asylum 49, it takes the reader inside an old hospital outside Salt Lake City which is now a Halloween haunted house-style attraction. I moved in there for a week during October of 2015 in order to investigate, and had some incredible experiences. The book will be co-written with Cami Andersen.
I always have one eye on future book project, and 2016 already has two fascinating cases on the horizon. In February I fly to the UK in order to spend a week in what was once a prison for witches. Now hundreds of years old and in private hands, this prison has driven out tenant after tenant, one of whom sadly took his own life in there. Despite being an agnostic, I’m wise enough to be taking along a co-investigator who is also a Catholic priest – they say that there are no atheists in the trenches, after all! A book covering that particular case and its investigation will be forthcoming in either 2016 or 2017 and will be co-written with Vanessa Mitchell.
As if that wasn’t enough, I’m heading back to England during the summer to move into a private residence (now abandoned – no tenants have been brave enough to stay there) for a week in order to investigate it. The house was the subject of a movie named When the Lights Went Out, and has been declared scene of the most violent poltergeist activity on record by several investigators. The case is better known as The Black Monk of Pontefract, and the evidence for this haunting is very impressive already. I must confess to being more than a little bit nervous about this one!
If you are reading this blog post, it means that you may well have handed over your hard-earned money to buy one or more of my books. I would like to thank you from the bottom of my heart for helping me further my dream of becoming a writer for a living. It has been quite the adventure, and it would not have been possible without your support – so thank you. I hope that you continue to enjoy my work and join me on my adventures, and that 2016 brings you happiness, peace, and joy.
Your friend,
Richard Estep
