Title: Burning the Middle Ground

Author: L. Andrew Cooper
Publisher: BlackWyrm
ISBN: 978-1-61318-138-6
Binding: Paperback
Pages: 330
Available @: Amazon and Barnes & Noble

Today I have the pleasure of Spotlighting in my blog, writer L Andrew Cooper! His debut novel is titled, “Burning the Middle Ground.”

L Andrew Cooper is a writer at BlackWyrm Publishing, a publisher of fine speculative fiction. Cooper is a fresh new voice and rising star in the speculative fiction world.

Biography:

L. Andrew Cooper thinks the smartest people like horror, fantasy, and sci-fi. Early in life, he couldn’t handle the scary stuff–he’d sneak and watch horror films and then keep his parents up all night with his nightmares. In the third grade, he finally convinced his parents to let him read grownup horror novels: he started with Stephen King’s Firestarter, and by grade five, he was doing book reports on The Stand.

When his parents weren’t being kept up late by his nightmares, they worried that his fascination with horror fiction would keep him from experiencing more respectable culture. That all changed when he transitioned from his public high school in the suburbs of Atlanta, Georgia to uber-respectable Harvard University, where he studied English Literature. From there, he went on to get a Ph.D. in English from Princeton, turning his longstanding engagement with horror into a dissertation. The dissertation became the basis for his first book, Gothic Realities (2010). More recently, his obsession with horror movies turned into a book about one of his favorite directors, Dario Argento (2012). He also co-edited the textbook Monsters (2012), an attempt to infect others with the idea that scary things are worth people’s serious attention.

After living in Florida, South Carolina, Georgia, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and California, Andrew now lives in Louisville, Kentucky, where he teaches at the University of Louisville. Burning the Middle Ground is his debut novel.

Burning the Middle Ground is a unique blend of horror and dark fantasy which takes place in a  a small Southern town being ripped asunder by a supernatural conspiracy.

Five years after tragic murders divide Kenning, Georgia along religious lines, Ronald Glassner, a web journalist from New York, arrives to write a book about the tragedy’s sole survivor, Brian McCullough. Homicidal house pets, enucleated corpses, and menacing apparitions soon help Ronald understand that there’s something much bigger going on in Kenning, something connected to the town’s First Church and the imposing Reverend Michael Cox. With Brian, Brian’s girlfriend Melanie Grayson, progressive preacher Jeanne Harper, and police officer Winston Beecher, Ronald embarks on an investigation that takes them all into a nightmarish plot that will change the entire country.

I thoroughly enjoyed L Andrew Cooper’s modern take on the Horror/Dark Fantasy hybrid genre he produced in Burning the Middle Ground and I’m sure you will also! As a writer, I’m  honored to be in a position to spread the word about such a talented storyteller.

You owe it to yourself to check out Burning the Middle Ground, it’s definitely a treat to be had!