Broken Barriers

By Stephen Mark Rainey

The Compelling Sequel to The House at Black Tooth Pond

SIX WEEKS AGO: A series of horrific events rocked the small, mountain community of Aiken Mill, Virginia—a horrifically mutilated body vanishing from the town morgue and numerous prominent individuals going missing without a trace—leaving both local and Federal law enforcement agencies baffled.

NOW: Celeste Muir, a former FBI agent with extensive experience in paranormal phenomena, allies herself with Aiken Mill Sheriff Bryce Parrott to face the unknown forces that have terrorized the town.

Enter Leo Bray. A sinister, grotesque stranger who appears to know more than anyone should about the recent calamities. Every person he contacts first suffers anxiety, followed by hallucinations, and then uncanny visions of other worlds. Other dimensions.

With their every step forward, Agent Muir and Sheriff Parrott encounter ever-more menacing terrors. Who is Leo Bray? What is his connection with the dire events plaguing the community? And what new, vast horror is stirring at Black Tooth Pond—a dark, legend-haunted body of water hidden deep in the surrounding forest?

Time is running out for the people of Aiken Mill.

Praise for Broken Barriers

“A new novel from Stephen Mark Rainey is always cause for celebration, and Broken Barriers, a direct sequel to The House at Black Tooth Pond, does not disappoint. Rainey’s story is full of subtle wit and creeping dread, sitting somewhere near the intersection of Twin Peaks, The X-Files, Kolchak: The Night Stalker, and The Kingdom of Nye. I had a blast.”
—K. L. Young, author of The Secret Language of Spiders and others

“The cry of the whippoorwill is not what it seems, investigators are baffled, and the town of Aiken Mill—often known as ‵the cold case capital of the world´—holds ancient, terrifying secrets. Cosmic horror readers will devour this sequel to The House at Black Tooth Pond.”
—Mike Davis, The Lovecraft eZine

“Stephen Mark Rainey is the only writer whose prose ever gave me an actual thrill of fear. In Broken Barriers, he takes us back to the town of Aiken Mill for his own style of combined Lovecraftian and Appalachian horror. The plot hurtles along, gripping the reader with damn near unbearable tension as the characters scramble to make sense of the horror overwhelming the sleepy college town. I sure stayed up way too late, unable to turn the pages fast enough.”
—Matthew Carpenter, The Lovecraft eZine

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