Today on Fanfiaddict we’re bringing you a series spotlight for Jonathan Shuerger’s Shades of Black series! Make sure to check out all the info below including the book blurb, what inspired the series, purchase links, and a little bit about the author! The 5th book in this series, Desolate, comes out in a few days on October 31st!
Book 1 Info
Series: Shades of Black
Title: In Darkness Cast
Length: 124,800 words
Publication Date: Nov. 10, 2020
Publisher: Creative Grumbles LLC
Purchase Links: Amazon, Book 1, Preorder Book 5
Book 1 Blurb
When Hell’s legions invade his homeland, a desperate warrior turns to the only mentor he can find – a bitter champion of the Everlasting Dark.
Gideon Halcyon wants nothing more than to save his people from the forces of Hell. Demons and cultists run roughshod over his home, slaughtering and sacrificing to a trifecta of fallen angels on the cusp of destroying the kingdoms of Man. Hope seems infantile in the face of extinction itself…
…until Gideon meets Ashkelon.
Coming from the Void beyond the world, Ashkelon alone survives the world he left in ruins. Cynical and ruthless, the dark sorcerer seethes with millennia of hatred, and his cursed sword Acherlith shrieks with the last screams of a thousand failed heroes.
Ashkelon makes Gideon an offer – to train him to be a hero of the Light beyond the failures sealed within his blade, a peerless warrior exceeding even the exacting standards of the Everlasting Dark. Reluctantly, Gideon accepts, and is thrust into a world of infinite cruelty under Ashkelon’s black fist where the slightest misstep will see him dead at the sorcerer’s hand.
As Hell consumes the hopes of Man, a hero is forged in Darkness.
Story Inspiration
I am a Marine, and I wrote this novel for my Marines. Every man and woman that joins the United States Marine Corps is an idealist. No one joins the Marines for college, benefits or healthcare. They join because they want to be Marines.
But I found, in the course of my enlistment, that Marines tend to lose that idealism. They lose it fast. The Marines that I knew were hard, fatalistic cynics who had lost faith in God and country. Then Marines get out of the Corps, and they lose the brotherhood that we had as we all spread across the country.
In my opinion, this is why veterans kill themselves at the rate of 22 a day, and I want to try to put some brakes on that process. I listened to the anger, disappointment and bitterness of my Marines, and combined them into a character that would respect and express their experience, Ashkelon. Ashkelon fights against the Light of his world, demanding that it prove itself worthy. In a climactic battle against Avalon’s armies, Ashkelon…wins. Left with nothing but the ashes of innocents and heroes falling through his fingers, Ashkelon refuses to believe that he is the most powerful authority in the universe. He cannot be all there is. So he launches on a search to find a hero capable of countering the Darkness within him, and bring it to justice.
It is at this point that he encounters Gideon, the idealist. This young soldier has not yet had the naïveté beaten from him, and Ashkelon sets about training him to be a hero that a bitter champion of the Dark can respect.
Shades of Black is the story of their journey together, as the idealist learns the harsh reality of the lifetime of war awaiting him, and the cynic sees the resilience of the idealist and begins to long for that again
Author Bio/Links
Jonathan Shuerger was born to Air Force parents while they were stationed in Madrid, Spain. He grew up on the East Coast of the US before his parents headed to the mission field in Zacatecas, Mexico. In 2012, Jonathan joined the United States Marine Corps as an Arabic Cryptologic Linguist, and served until 2017. Since that time, Jonathan has devoted himself full-time to his authorial career, having published The Exorcism of Frosty the Snowman and the Shades of Black series. He launched his podcast “Stories With A Marine Corps Dad” for his girls in August 2021.
Author Website: https://creativegrumbles.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/JonathanShuerg1
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