Loren Rhoads

I am the author of The Dangerous Type, Kill By Numbers, and No More Heroes: the In the Wake of the Templars trilogy.  I’m the co-author (with Brian Thomas) of the As Above, So Below books, Lost Angels and Angelus Rose, which are coming out this year.  My short stories appear in nEvermore: Tales of Murder, Mystery, and the Macabre and in the new anthology Fright Mare: Women Write Horror. Oh, and I blog about cemeteries as travel destinations. My collection of travel essays is called Wish You Were Here: Adventures in Cemetery Travel.

I think of my novels as mashups.  Before The Dangerous Type came out last year, I described it as a Hong Kong-style revenge space opera with a Hammer Horror villain.  Publishers Weekly accused me of bringing the style of grimdark fantasy to space opera. Kill By Numbers, the second volume in the series, is a Philip K. Dick mind-warp adventure story about confronting a stalker ex-boyfriend who wants to change the galaxy.  The third book, No More Heroes, is a courtroom drama with bounty hunters, killer robots, and time travel.

The As Above, So Below series, which I’m rebooting in April, combines erotic horror and dark fantasy.  It’s about a succubus who sets her sights on an angel – who then possesses her with a mortal girl’s soul.  Once again I’m crossing genres and blurring boundaries.

I read across genres.  I like science fiction ghost stories and zombie erotica and political urban fantasy. I don’t understand why anyone would choose to limit herself to one genre.

You can find Loren and her work at the following places:

Loren’s Blog: http://lorenrhoads.com/blog
Loren’s Cemetery Blog: http://cemeterytravel.com/
Loren on Facebook: www.facebook.com/loren.rhoads.5
Loren on Twitter: http://twitter.com/morbidloren
Amazon Author Page: Loren Rhoads

Featured Works:

The Dangerous Type: In the Wake of the Templars Book One

Set in the wake of a galaxy-wide war and the destruction of a human empire, The Dangerous Typefollows the awakening of one of the galaxy’s most dangerous assassins and her quest for vengeance. Entombed for twenty years, Raena has been found and released.

Thallian has been on the lam for the last fifteen years.  He’s a wanted war criminal whose entire family has been hunted down and murdered for their role in the galaxy-wide genocide of the Templars. His name is the first on Raena’s list, as he’s the one that enslaved her, made her his assassin, and ultimate put her in a tomb. But Thallian is willing to risk everything–including his army of cloned sons–to capture her. Now it’s a race to see who kills whom first.

Alternatively, Gavin has spent the last twenty years trying to forget about Raena, whom he once saved and then lost to Thallian. Raena’s adopted sister, Ariel, has been running from the truth — the one about Raena, about herself and Gavin — and doesn’t know if she’ll be able to face either of them.

The Dangerous Type is a mix of military science fiction and an adventurous space opera that grabs you from the first pages and doesn’t let go. Along with a supporting cast of smugglers, black market doctors, and other ne’er-do-wells sprawled across a galaxy brimming with alien life, The Dangerous Type is a fantastic beginning to Loren Rhoads’s epic trilogy.

Available on Amazon

Wish You Were Here

“Lovingly researched and lushly described, Loren’s essays transport you to the graveyard, where she is quite a tour guide. Curiosity and compassion burn at the heart of these essays.”—Paula Guran, editor of Dark Echo magazine Almost every tourist destination has a graveyard. You go to Yosemite National Park: there’s a graveyard. You go to Maui: graveyards everywhere you look. The Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbor and the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park: both graveyards. The number one tourist destination in Michigan has three cemeteries. America’s best-preserved Gold Rush ghost town has five. Gettysburg is a National Park because it has a graveyard. Some graveyards are even tourist destinations in themselves: the Old Jewish Cemetery of Prague, the colonial burying grounds of Boston, and Kennedy’s eternal flame in Arlington National Cemetery. Jim Morrison’s grave in Père Lachaise Cemetery ranks in the top five tourist sites of Paris. Wish You Were Here: Adventures in Cemetery Travel contains 35 graveyard travel essays, which visit more than 50 cemeteries, churchyards, and gravesites across the globe. Over the past two decades, Loren Rhoads has visited literally hundreds of graveyards. She’s traveled to London’s Highgate Cemetery, strolled through the Paris Catacombs, seen Hollywood Forever pulled back from the brink of destruction, studied Native American graveyards in Michigan, explored a circuit minister’s churchyard on Maui, delved into the Protestant Cemetery of Rome and Zoshigaya Reien in Tokyo, and made stops in Prague, Boston, Los Angeles, Hiroshima, Yosemite, Sleepy Hollow, Gettysburg, and New Orleans along the way. Come along on her adventures in cemeteries around the world. Loren Rhoads was the creator of the cult nonfiction magazine Morbid Curiosity. She edited the book Death’s Garden: Relationships with Cemeteries and served as the monthly cemetery columnist at Gothic.Net for four years. Now she blogs about graveyards as travel destinations at CemeteryTravel.com. “With her dead-on honesty and her fascination for the dark side of life in all its complexity, Loren’s writing never fails to make me think.”—Thomas Roche, Loren’s editor at Gothic.Net

Available on Amazon

Fright Mare-Women Write Horror

Women write horror and have written it since before Mary Shelley wrote FRANKENSTEIN. This anthology is to highlight the fact women write great horror and to kill the fallacy that they aren’t in some way up to standard. They are. Read here stories by Elizabeth Massie, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Lucy Taylor, and a plethora of other great writers as they work on your nerves, get inside your head, and bang out some of the scariest tales written today. I’m proud to present these women for your consideration, as Rod Serling might say, as I ask you to step into FRIGHT MARE. Lock the door and windows, put on a light, and remember, it’s not real. It’s not real. Midnight awaits, monsters scheme to take you away, the strange and weird wait in the shadows, but it’s not real. Is it?

Available on Amazon