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J.D. Barker
As a child I was always told the dark could not hurt me, that the shadows creeping in the corners of my room were nothing more than just that, shadows. The sounds nothing more than the settling of our old home, creaking as it found comfort in the earth only to move again when it became restless,... show more

As a child I was always told the dark could not hurt me, that the shadows creeping in the corners of my room were nothing more than just that, shadows. The sounds nothing more than the settling of our old home, creaking as it found comfort in the earth only to move again when it became restless, if ever so slightly. I would never sleep without closing the closet door, oh no; the door had to be shut tight. The darkness lurking inside needed to be held at bay, the whispers silenced. Rest would only come after I checked under the bed at least twice and quickly wrapped myself in the safety of the sheets (which no monster could penetrate), pulling them tight over my head.I would never go down to the basement.Never.I had seen enough movies to know better, I had read enough stories to know what happens to little boys that wandered off into dark, dismal places alone. And there were stories, so many stories.Reading was my sanctuary, a place where I could disappear for hours at a time, lost in the pages of a good book. It didn't take long before I felt the urge to create my own.I first began to write as a child, spinning tales of ghosts and gremlins, mystical places and people. For most of us, that's were it begins--as children we have such wonderful imaginations, some of us have simply found it hard to grow up. I've spent countless hours trying to explain to friends and family why I enjoy it, why I would rather lock myself in a quiet little room and put pen to paper for hours at a time than throw around a baseball or simply watch television. Don't get me wrong, sometimes I want to do just that, sometimes I wish for it, but even then the need to write is always there in the back of my mind, the characters are impatiently tapping their feet, waiting their turn, wanting to be heard. I wake in the middle of the night and reach for the pad beside my bed, sometimes scrawling page after page of their words, their lives. Then they're quiet, if only for a little while. To stop would mean madness, or even worse--the calm, numbing sanity I see in others as they slip through the day without purpose. They don't know what it's like, they don't understand. Something as simple as a pencil can open the door to a new world, can create life or experience death. Writing can take you to places you've never been, introduce you to people you've never met, take you back to when you first saw those shadows in your room, when you first heard the sounds mumbling ever so softly from your closet, and it can show you what uttered them. It can scare the hell out of you, and that's when you know it's good.J.D. Barker lives in Lake Worth, Florida where he is hard at work on a novel and his syndicated newspaper column, Revealed.
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Community Reviews
Lora Hates Spam
Lora Hates Spam rated it 5 years ago
by R.J. Barker This one starts out a little 'bitty', with quotes and false starts before the prologue, which itself is separated in time from the story that begins in chapter one. To be honest, it was a slog. I wanted to DNF it every time I picked it up. It seemed to have trouble deciding what g...
runner
runner rated it 5 years ago
A disappointing read, overlong, coming of age story concerning Jack Thatch and his infatuation with a young mysterious girl called Stella. Comic book characters, dressed in long white coats brandishing guns and driving high powered SUV's. Add to this a police investigation that is attempting to unra...
BrokenTune
BrokenTune rated it 5 years ago
Dracul was a wonderfully Gothic read that includes many of the elements that we know from Dracula, the original story and the adaptations. However, this re-assembling of the different elements of the Dracula story, unfortunately, did not work for me: the familiar elements somehow just felt old wh...
Reading is my ESCAPE from Reality!
Reading is my ESCAPE from Reality! rated it 7 years ago
Forsaken was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award by the Horror Writers Association for the Best Debut Novel in 2014. So, I had high hopes, but I ended up with mixed feelings about this one. One of my favorite parts of this book was the fact that it contains a clever nod to Stephen King. The main cha...
Bark at the Ghouls
Bark at the Ghouls rated it 8 years ago
I don’t read a ton of straight up thrillers because the police procedural bits usually don’t thrill me but this one did. It’s about a serial killer (those I do like!) and not only does it follow the current day rush to find a kidnapped teen left for dead, it also tells the creepy tale of the killer’...
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