james lake jr

The things we want are so very rarely the things we need. Clifton Heights, a modest Adirondack town, offers many unique attractions. Arcane Delights sells both paperbacks and hard-to-find limited editions. The Skylark Diner serves the best home-cooked meals around, with friendly service and a smile. Every August, Mr. Jingo’s County Fair visits, to the delight of children and adults. In essence, Clifton Heights is the quintessential small American town. Everyone knows everyone else, and everyone is treated like family. It is quiet, simple, and peaceful. But shadows linger here. Flitting in dark corners, from the corner of the eye. If you walk down Main Street after dark, the slight scrape of shoes on asphalt whispers you're not alone, but when you look over your shoulder, no one is there. The moon shines high and bright in the night sky, but instead of throwing light, it only seems to make the shadows lengthen. Children disappear. Teens run away. Hunters get lost in the woods with frightening regularity. Husbands go mad, and wives vanish in the dead of night. And still, when the sun rises in the morning, you are greeted by townspeople with warm waves and friendly smiles, and the shivers pass as everything seems fresh and new... Until night falls once more. Handy's Pawn and Thrift sits several blocks down from Arcane Delights. Like any thrift store, its wares range from the mundane to the bizarre. By daylight, it seems just another slice of small town Americana. But in its window hangs a sign which reads: We Have Things You Need. And when a lonely traveling salesman comes looking for something he desperately wants, after normal visiting hours, after night has fallen, he will face a harsh truth among the shelves of Handy’s Pawn and Thrift: the things we want are rarely the things we need. ©️ Crystal Lake Publishing

What if you were held captive by your own family? Emma Rawlins has spent the last year a prisoner. The months following her mother's death dragged her father into a paranoid spiral of conspiracy theories and doomsday premonitions. Obsessing him, controlling him, they now whisper the end days are finally at hand. And he doesn’t intend to face them alone. Emma finds herself drugged and dragged to a secluded cabin, the last refuge from a society supposedly due to collapse. Their cabin a snowbound fortress, her every move controlled, but even that isn't enough to weather the end of the world. ©️ Crystal Lake Publishing Everything she knows is out of reach, lost beyond a haze of white. There is no choice but to play her father's game while she plans her escape. But there is a force far colder than the freezing drifts. Ancient, ravenous, it knows no mercy. And it's already had a taste...

It’s end of October 1985 and the crumbling river town of Dubois, Iowa is shocked by the gruesome murder of one of the pillars of the community. Detective David Carlson has no motive, no evidence, and only one lead: the macabre local legend of “Boris Orlof,” a late night horror movie host who burned to death during a stage performance at the drive-in on Halloween night twenty years ago and the teenage loner obsessed with keeping his memory alive. The body count is rising and the darkness that hangs over the town grows by the hour. Time is running out as Carlson desperately chases shadows into a nightmare world of living horrors. On Halloween the drive-in re-opens at midnight for a show no one will ever forget. ©️ Crystal Lake Publishing

Bryony Adams is destined to be murdered, but fortunately Fate has terrible marksmanship. In order to survive, she must run as far and as fast as she can. After arriving in Seattle, Bryony befriends a tortured musician, a market fish-thrower, and a starry-eyed hero who is secretly a serial killer bent on fulfilling Bryony’s dark destiny. ©️ Crystal Lake Publishing

Maxine Shepard know nothing of her legacy and what she was. She never liked moving out of Manhattan to the small town of Haven in Alabama. She have a rough relationship with her mother. She did not even know about her grandmother until then. Her mother kept a lot of secrets from her and she is discovering them weeks before she turns eighteen. A lot of people are after her and she dis not even know why she seems to be very valuable to them. She finds new friends, a prospect of a love life and finds her true identity and of a prophecy that is yet to be fulfilled. She is the new Luna.

After being publicly rejected by her mate, the Alpha's son, orphans Kit, and her little sister Cami, run away from their pack. Seven years later, who should walk into the diner that Kit works at and Cami studies in, but the new Beta of the pack they abandoned, who just so happens to be Cami’s very smitten mate. Kit is horrified when Cami begs her to come back to the pack where she still feels the humiliation from her rejection, but she can’t abandon her only family, so she reluctantly tags along. What she doesn’t expect, is that the once arrogant but popular son of the pack’s healer, Colin, has turned out to be not just a nice guy, but smoking hot too. And much to her surprise, he is interested in her. Which is great, because the mate who rejected her is now her Alpha and seems to take amusement in embarrassing her. Embarrassing her, and at the same time, wanting to use her for his pleasure, which even though she can’t stand him, she struggles to be able to physically resist him. And to make matters worse, he refuses to let her reject him back, threatening to kick her out and prevent her from seeing her loved ones anymore. Will she ever be able to finally reject him back and be happy with Colin, who wants her for more than just her body, or will she forever be trapped in an infatuation with someone who is emotionally uninterested?

As Jason and I try to stay one step ahead of the Marching Tides and their nefarious associates, we draw ever closer to the shocking truth of who the mastermind behind the Marching Tides really is. Something tells me I’ll regret learning the answers at the end of my journey.©️ Crystal Lake Publishing

Bill is a nobody, a health inspector who’s not above taking a few dollars to overlook a restaurant’s mouse problem, and hated by nearly everyone except his long-suffering girlfriend. His nephew, Trent, isn’t much better: sexually and morally confused, he’s probably the worst teenage con artist on the East Coast. But today, these two losers harbor a sentient parasite with a sarcastic sense of humor and a ravenous appetite. As the parasite figures out how to control its new human hosts, the focus of its desires grows from delicious cheeseburgers and beer to something much darker and more dangerous.©️ Crystal Lake Publishing

The fate of the world rests in the hands of four dysfunctional teenagers and a bunch of oddball adults. ©️ Crystal Lake Publishing

Sound of his Bones Breaking, a novella that will leave you truly shaken. Board for free. But the cost might be your life. ©️ Crystal Lake Publishing