Series: Fearbreeders

Genres: Fantasy, Horror

Guest Post: Rich James discusses his new eBook!

Or, more to the point, I want to discuss the part you, the reader, play in my new YA fantasy eBook. I want to show you how you can along with my characters help them face up to and defeat their personal and real-word demons … and they can in turn help you face up to and defeat yours.
That’s a lot of bang for your buck for a YA fantasy novel! My new eBook, Fearbreeders tells the story of three young, hip “psychic channelers” fighting all sorts of monsters, ghosts and ghouls in the modern world. As the story progresses, the kids realise that, in fact, the monsters they are fighting are the physical manifestation of their own worst fears, given shape and form by their psychic powers. They realise that to overcome these deep-seated fears, they’ll need to first take a look inside themselves. Only once they’ve defeated their personal demons will they be able to defeat the very real evil they inadvertently created…
I developed the idea as much in response to the creative process as the idea I was creating. Think about it: the creation of effective villains in books and other entertainment is achieved by making the antagonist a representation of something inside the hero that the hero doesn’t like about him or herself, and doesn’t want to confront. (All you story-savvy readers out there already knew this, of course!) Usually this means creating a villain and instilling in him, her or it these negative hero traits and then letting the hero do battle with the villain. Thus, in a metaphorical sense, when the hero defeats the villain he or she is overcoming the negative traits within him or herself.
That’s how villains have worked since Aesop and Homer – and it’s why it feels so good to defeat a well-constructed baddie! My core innovation was to simply make the manifestation of these fears literally real. At first, when I broached this idea with friends and other writer colleagues, the general consensus was that if I made the characters’ fears literally, physically, tangibly real then it wouldn’t be much of a story. After all, if your worst fear literally walked into the room right now and struck up a conversation with you, you’d immediately recognise it for that it was, correct? I mean it would be so obvious, right? … Right…?
Wrong. And that is my point. We as human beings developed the fear response in order to transfer our fears to the external world as a sort of predictive survival mechanism. That is why the scariest fears are actually those hiding in the places we don’t dare look: and those places exist not in the outside world… but inside of ourselves.
So go on, download my book and take a peek at that dark place inside yourself where you dare not look. Trust me, it’s a lot easier if you don’t have to face it alone, hence why I write what I do and reach out to others. Have fun!   
Here’s the jacket blurb… 
What if your darkest fears were made real? What would they look and sound like? What form would they take? Would you want to hear what they have to say? More terrifyingly, what would you say to them?
For twelve-year-old psychic channeler, Billy Bickster, his worst nightmares come true – literally – when he discovers that the terrifying monsters pursuing him and his two friends in their dreams are real. Worse, glowing green with demonic red eyes, these creatures – known as “Fearbreeders” – are actually the summation of the children’s darkest, hidden fears.
Welcome to a new world of entertainment! Click on the in-text links as you read, and explore the same sites the internet-savvy characters in the book are using to solve this puzzling tale. But be warned: take up this challenge only if you dare find this evil before our heroes do… otherwise you risk it finding you through your eReader and the internet.

Author Bio:

Rich James is a novelist, blogger, editor, speaker and teacher living in east London, England.
He can usually be found people watching on the streets of east London to get inspiration for his weird and wonderful fictional creatures and monsters – after all, who would deny Leytonstone High Road is Middle-earth with a McDonalds drive-thru?