Meet some truly horrific heroes!

I have a fondness for horror mixed with heroes. Both Marvel and DC made an effort to tinge their lines with a sense of creepy and classic monsters. Whether it was Dracula fighting Dr. Strange and the X-Men or the likes of I, Vampire and Swamp Thing at DC, the idea of creatures of the night bumping into legendary comic heroes is just fun to me.

Which is why six years ago, I debuted the first volume of Horror Heroes. The book series is built around a simple premise: turn a horror icon into a hero of some kind. I invited a few like-minded other writers to contribute and so an anthology series was born!

In the first book, I brought the world "Half-Life." In it, I introduced a raven-haired high school girl more interested in boys than academics. But when she stumbles on an experiment involving synthetic vampire blood, she's transformed into a new breed of vampire! Forced into heroism, she battles the true threat to the school, even as her strange abilities earn her a name from yore: Dracula!

Donna McAvoy proves to be an interesting foil in this tale. It isn't her vampirism that makes her a less than nice being, but her upbringing. She's a spoiled rich kid intent on getting everything she desires, simply because her father's money could make that happen. But when she's pulled into a darker supernatural world, her entire life changes. The result is a fun character study inspired by teenage slice of life tales and classic superheroes.

Three years after the original, Horror Heroes 2 debuted. This time my tale was inspired by beach house romance tales, even as I introduced a new breed of underwater creature. Lynda Adams moves into a seaside home for the summer before college. She's looking to live her life free of her parents for a month before she returns to their map for her future. When her first date attacks her, she's saved by a strange local boy named Ben Browning. As she gets to know Ben, she soon learns he's not like other boys. In fact, he's a Deep One, one of the ancient race of sea-dwelling creatures. Yet he's also different, a new form of hybrid between that race and humanity. Unlike his brethren, he can shift from human to Deep One form. This ability comes in handy as he and Lynda learn they face a danger far greater than they ever suspected!

I wrote this one a couple years before The Shape of Water released, but ultimately it features some of the same themes of alienation and looking beneath the surface. "The Beach House" remains completely unique from anything else I've written. I still think it's the best novelette I've ever written.

Plus, these two volumes bring a plethora of heroic monstrous variations, including mummies, sasquatches and even an invisible werewolf! So if you're ready for some heroic Halloween hijinx, head over to Amazon to pick up both these titles. If you do read them, be sure to give them a review. Every review helps bring more viewers to these fun tales of creatures turned heroes!