The Blood of Father Time Duology

The two book series, THE BLOOD OF FATHER TIME, by Alan M. Clark, Stephen C. Merritt and Lorelei Shannon, has finally sold!

This dark, time-travel fantasy series, which has been under submission for over ten years, sold to Five Star Books in the summer of 2006. The cover art seen above for Books 1 and 2 are by Steve Gilberts. The first of the series, THE BLOOD OF FATHER TIME, BOOK 1, THE NEW CUT, will be released May of 2007, the second book, THE BLOOD OF FATHER TIME, BOOK 2, THE MYSTIC CLAN'S GRAND PLOT will come out in August of the same year. THE BLOOD OF FATHER TIME DUOLOGY is a time-travel fantasy inspired by actual historical events and the outlaw clans of early eighteen-hundreds Tennessee.  It's a coming-of-age story, an epic adventure, and a rich historical drama.

Back cover copy for Book 1:

THE BLOOD OF FATHER TIME, BOOK 1, THE NEW CUT is the story of Joel Biggs, the intelligent, brutalized, bullying son of an alcoholic father.  At twelve years old, Joel and two friends wander down a sunlit creek in rural Tennessee, and into the early eighteen-hundreds.  There they run afoul of the infamous Wesley Pike and his band of vicious river pirates.  With every bit of cunning, strength, and skill Joel can muster , he survives the adventure and makes it back to the present and is transformed from an angry bully into a compassionate leader. 

Back cover copy for Book 2:

THE BLOOD OF FATHER TIME, BOOK 2, THE MYSTIC CLAN'S GRAND PLOT is a time-travel adventure involving the land pirates of early 1800s Tennessee and an alcoholic history professor, Joel Biggs, who is tormented by memories of a traumatic childhood adventure through time. The only person who could confirm the reality of this fantastic event has recently died and Joel has begun to doubt everything, even his own sanity. The only way he can find peace, the only way he can live with himself, is to travel back in time once more. If Joel can find his friend Mark, left behind in the 1800's, perhaps he can redeem himself. But that means returning to a time and place of incredible danger, brutal violence, and sudden death. Joel will have to face overwhelming hardship--and he will have to face himself.






Joel took a stiff drink from his pint of rye and stared at the package. His belly slowly filled with ice, and he didn't know why. The package was brutally stuffed into his mailbox, the brown wrapping paper shredded and torn. The book inside the paper was partly exposed, its spine skinned and damaged. The book was obviously very old. Joel touched it, nearly sick with dread. Abruptly irritated with himself, he ripped the return address from a loose flap of the brown wrapper and squinted, trying to focus. Billy. He squeezed his eyes shut as pain thudded in his chest.

Joel knew the title of the book. Billy had sworn to find Joel a copy of it, and when Billy said he'd do something, it always got done. Now I'll never get to thank him. He crumpled the address in his sweaty palm and dropped it into the mud.

Goddamn I miss you Billy, he thought. And screw you for leaving me when I needed you most. He took another deep pull on his pint of rye, thinking childishly of how much Billy would disapprove.

Billy Howard was the only person Joel Biggs had ever really trusted. They held a truth between them about their past that they could not reveal to anyone else. The truth was unbelievable, Joel knew--he had a hard time believing it himself--but having asked Billy to confirm that truth so many times over the years, he had only to look at his friend with the question in his eyes for Billy to nod his head in affirmation.

It hadn't always been that way. Joel had spent most of his high school years trying to pretend Billy didn't exist. If Billy didn't exist, what had happened to them couldn't exist. That was what he told himself, anyway, as he spent his teen years stealing his father's liquor and chasing tail.

Joel was a drunk by the time he entered college. Nobody knew it. He functioned well, he attended his classes, studied, even got decent grades. But every night he dropped into a dreamless, alcohol-soaked sleep, where the world was what you saw, and there were no nasty surprises waiting for you just down the creek. A world where a boy named Mark still lived, where Mark had not vanished into a place that just shouldn't exist.

Joel was a young professor when Billy showed up on his doorstep one night. Joel had stared into Billy's face, unable to react. But when Billy grabbed him in a fierce hug, it all came roaring back, everything that had happened that summer, twenty years ago. They'd stayed up all night talking, assuring one another that they weren't crazy.

Billy had used the respect and powerful trust they had in each other, their connection to life-altering events--any emotional tool he could lay his hands on--to convince Joel to stop drinking and start attending meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous. It had taken years and much discussion. During this time Joel's life had consistently spiraled downward: Two DUIs, a broken arm from falling down a flight of stairs, most of his family and friends disowning him, and the university threatening to terminate him if he didn't stop teaching his classes while drunk or hung over.

Billy stayed in constant contact with him, even when his job had taken him to Memphis. Billy's efforts had finally paid off, and Joel had become sober a little over a year ago.

That's all gone to shit now. Thanks to Miss Nina 'Hot-crotch' Bryant, I'll be lucky to find anyone who'll hire me to teach. That's what you get for sticking your neck out and trying to help folks . . .

Joel bowed his head in shame, looking at the package stuck in his mailbox.

"Hey, Billy," he said out loud. "I know you didn't plan it that way. Fucking car wreck wasn't your idea. I just really--" His voice caught in his throat.

His rye-fogged mind drifted to the bogus sexual harassment charge at the university. Joel had known he'd be able to get through it with Billy's help. Suddenly that was not going to be possible. He'd held it together after the complaint was filed, with Billy jollying him along. His friend had even promised to come to Dexter to visit. Then he was dead. The pain of that was too much to bear. For the past three weeks, Joel had plunged into alcohol with a vengeance. With every drink, he half-hoped he'd die.

Joel carefully worked the package free, his movements made blunt and clumsy by the rye. When the book came loose, the rest of his mail tumbled out onto the ground. He gathered it all up and stumbled across the street to the bridge over Brown's Creek, dropping a trail of junk mail along the way.

He went down to the mailbox at about the same time every afternoon. But it wasn't the mail that drew him. It was only an excuse. Once he had walked to his mailbox, it was only a few more steps to cross the intersection and stand on the bridge over the creek at the property where Billy grew up. There he would sit on the raised concrete edge of the bridge and look at The New Cut, as he and his boyhood friends used to call that stretch of slow-moving stream. Joel would look into the water and wonder how he could have made things turn out differently. After all these years, he still looked for Mark.

He sat, his feet dangling over the side of the bridge, and stripped away the ragged paper from the old book. A card fell from its pages and landed on his electric bill, now two months overdue. Hand trembling, he picked it up.

For my best friend, the card read, thanks for all the good times in the treehouse.

A sudden cry caught in Joel's throat, and his pulse pounded in his neck. Washing the pain away with the last of the whiskey, he dropped the book and staggered clumsily to his feet. Looking up, he gazed out over the creek and saw his boyhood friends, Billy Howard and Mark Ryder, splashing in the water. The smile was on his face before he could stop it, and he reached out, starting to call to them, but it wasn't Mark and Billy. It was two boys he didn't know.

"You kids get outta there!" he shouted, suddenly filled with panic.

The boys ignored him. They were just kids wanting a cool place to play on a hot day. They didn't understand that they were playing at the mouth of hell.

When Billy had still owned the property, he and Joel had come up with many plans over the years to wall off, reroute, or somehow destroy this stretch of Brown's Creek, but since this was a flood zone, the city would not allow anything that would constrict the flow of the creek. They had once erected a high fence and posted "no trespassing" signs, but kids had just crawled under the bridge from the other side. Occasionally another child would go missing here.

"You kids don't belong here!" Joel shouted again, "This is private property." Joel stumbled off the bridge and onto the grassy verge and lost his footing. He fell forward, landing hard on his forearms and skinning his elbows as he slid down toward the creek. A rush of sour stomach acid and cheap liquor seared his throat, filling his mouth, and he spat it out. He was just getting his feet under him, clawing his way back upright, when he heard their laughter.

"Look out," one of the boys shouted, laughing, "he's gonna barf on us!"

Joel roared and threw his empty bottle, hoping to scare them into running. It broke against rocks jutting up out of the creek.

The boys retreated upstream, into The New Cut. Horrified, Joel looked at the steep eight-foot banks of The New Cut, then down, through the water to the shattered remnants of some twenty years of drinking. He'd thrown a lot of broken glass in there. It was meant to be a sharp obstacle against the kids who wanted to play here. But he didn't really want to hurt them.

Joel stumbled along the bank until he was directly above the boys. "You kids know where you're headed, don'tcha? You're gonna disappear down that creek just like all the others. You've heard the stories about it, haven't you?"

"Yeah, everyone has, but we ain't scared," said the dark-haired one, sticking his chin out defiantly.

"Aw, shut the hell up, you fuckin' drunk!" This from the smaller boy, dirty blond hair, skinny arms like spider legs. He was looking at Joel the way he might have looked at a smear of dog shit on a new sneaker.

"Get outta the water, now!" Joel yelled. "It's fulla broken glass!"

"My ass!" yelled the older boy. "C'mon, Jeffy." He started leading the younger boy upstream.

Now Joel was angry and desperate. He ran ahead of them along the bank, unzipped his torn and ratty chinos and began pissing into the water, just upstream of the boys. Shouting insults, the boys turned back and ran, high-stepping through the water.

"Look out!" Joel bellowed, but they hit his booby trap of glass. The boys yelled in pain and danced toward the opposite bank, scrambling up, their torn feet leaving bloody prints in the mud.

"Serves you right!" Joel hollered. "Don't you ever come back!"

"I'm gonna tell!" The bigger boy yelled, standing in the red-streaked grass. The smaller one sat in the mud and sobbed.

Joel shook his fist and bellowed as they staggered away, arms around each other. He suddenly felt sick, and it wasn't the whiskey this time. Kids, they're just poor stupid kids . . . But cut-up feet were nothing, nothing at all, compared to what could have happened.

When they had gone, Joel noticed he'd misplaced the book. Backtracking to the bridge, he found where it had fallen, its pages fluttering in the breeze.

He read the title and winced at the stab of associated memories--The History of Matthew Crenshaw and His Adventure Exposing the Great Land Pirate, Jarrett Cotten and the Mystic Clan. Joel ran his hand over the tan cover, touched the gouges and scrapes his friendly neighborhood postman had inflicted on it. Goddamn, how I wanted this book. The copy he'd had as a child was somehow lost; or, he suspected, stolen. As an adult he'd searched for another copy over the years, in every dusty bookshop, with one rare book service after another. Where the hell had Billy found it?

After all the crap I gave him . . . all the shit he put up with from my drinking, he still did this for me. Guilt stabbed Joel through the chest, and his mouth filled with bitter sorrow. Now that he had the book, he didn't even want to look at it.

Tucking it under one arm, Joel headed across the street for home.

And more whiskey.

The idea hung accusingly in the air before him, but he couldn't argue with it. He knew he would be passed out by sundown. And this time, when he awoke at midnight, hungover and hurting, wanting another drink to kill the pain, Billy wouldn't be around to stop him.

His shoulders sagged as he entered the rundown house his father had left him. And, as always, when he looked into the mirror just inside the front door, he was greeted by the cruel ghost of his drunkard father. Same dead black eyes, same bruised purple bags beneath them. Same wet, slack mouth and sunken cheeks. Joel closed his eyes and turned away.

If I could start over and be a kid again, I wouldn't come home. I would stay and find some way to survive. Anything would be better than this.

He snagged another fifth from the near-empty pantry and sank down into his stained and sunken pit of a recliner. As he took a deep, burning pull, Joel remembered. He remembered when the future was something other than a stinking abyss, when the days were turning from warm to summer-hot, and he was about to embark on the greatest adventure--the only adventure--of his wasted life.