#12AngryRobotsOfChristmas ‘Night Terrors’ by Tim Waggoner

About the book…

When you dream, you visit the Maelstrom. Dream long enough and hard enough, and your dreams can break through into the living world.

So can your nightmares.

And who’s there to catch the dreams and nightmares as they fall into reality?

Meet the Shadow Watch. Pray you never need them…

First published in 2014 and given a brand new look last year, ‘Night Terrors’ by Tim Waggoner is the first book in the Shadow Watch Series.

This is a brilliant mashup of a police procedural novel crossed with an urban fantasy, where Audra, a burnt out cop, and her creation, Jinx, a six foot clown that is evil enough to give you courophobia by the osmotic process of reading his antics, are searching for a creation, a nightmare, gone rogue.

You take the best bits about a police procedural-a cop on the edge, a case that is unsolved, a comedy sidekick-and a supernatural , scary story about Nod, the realm of sleep where if you can tap into your dreams, at just the right level of imagination, they can come back with you to the real world.

The juxtaposition of horror and comedy in one grease painted form,is neatly echoed by the prescence of Audra who represents the process of law and order as it applies to the land of nightmares.

They are the Shadow Watch, the line between Nod and Earth, so need to try and work out just how a nightmare came through to the world of the living…and just how to send them back where they belong. If a nightmare is as individual as you are, then how can you begin to formulate a plan of attack? And how does working with your own nightmarish creation, on a daily basis, begin to wear down your susceptibility to what is frightening?

Tim also writes a lot of stand alone novels in the ‘Supernatural’ tie in series, for Titan and he really has a knack of not only being able to , in my humble opinion, replicate the sound of main characters so succinctly on the page, that when it comes to his own, original creations, he brings you into his world with a heady mix of driving plotlines and unique protagonists. As someone who has a traumatic past experience with clowns, seriously this was a book that gave me the heebie-jeebies from the cover onwards but then, as you read, you see the other side of the nightmare.

What do nightmares themselves fear or loathe?

Well for Mr Jinx, one of his triggers is definitely a certain song by Stephen Sondheim…

The violence is outlandish and not particularly gory, the entire concept of the land of Nod where your nightmares take flesh is genuinely very scary and the banter between Audra and Jinx is very much of the NYPD Blue kind, it grounds the somewhat whacky, and out there action scenes, to remind you that there is a mystery which needs solving at the heart of ‘Night Terrors’. The world building leaves you with room to imagine where future novels might lead to, whilst laying down the basic laws for the characters which inhabit the Shadow Watch to live by.

As an Ideator, Audra is a flawed and believable character who works neatly with her Incubus, Mr Jinx. They are a team of mismatched detectives, whose job it is to catch nightmares. But sometimes, facing up to your own is the hardest job of all.

About the author…

Tim Waggoner has published nearly fifty novels and seven short story collections, and his articles on writing have appeared in Writer’s Digest and Writers’ Journal, among others.

He’s won the Bram Stoker Award and has been a finalist for both the Shirley Jackson Award and the Scribe Award.

He teaches creative writing at Sinclair Community College in Dayton, Ohio.

Links-http://www.timwaggoner.com/

Twitter @timwaggoner @angryrobotbooks