Spotlight: Devil Inside by Clay McLeod Chapman
/
A man who’s back from the dead meets a woman who’s from somewhere even worse in Clay McLeod Chapman’s new horrormance about love, possession, and just a little murder.
After a traumatic accident that almost cost Jordan his life, he’s finally starting to feel normal again. Well, maybe not normal. Everything tastes like ash, and when he looks at the people around him, their faces start to melt. At least he’s not dead, right? His friends are doing their best to get him back on his feet, maybe find someone to talk to, perhaps even find someone to take his mind off his last failed relationship.
Then he meets Lilith. The two share an instant connection but after a wild and passionate night together, she ghosts him. Jordan searches the city for Lilith, desperate to see her again. But when a woman claiming to be Lilith shows up, wearing a different face but knowing intimate details about Jordan, he worries he’s losing his grip on reality. As he grows closer to this mysterious woman, he discovers that happily ever afters sometimes come at a cost. How far will Lilith take him, and how much darkness will he embrace to find love?
Devil Inside is a dark, demonic romance for fans of:
horror romance with an HEA
morally grey characters who are perfect for each other
paranormal and supernatural monster romance
fast-burn relationships
touch HIM and die feminine rage
Excerpt
JORDAN
Let me tell you about the day I died.
First pickup gets called in at —get this —7:58. The caffeine from my red eye has barely hit my bloodstream when my radio starts blowing up with a rush delivery. Some startup needs me to pony express a package down to Shockoe Bottom in the next thirty.
Not impossible. I just wish I could sit here with the Saddle Sores and sip what’s left of my double-barrel espresso. Get this day-old bagel down before kicking off my day.
So it goes.
The crew all meetings up in Carytown. We chain our bikes together in a spinal column of fixed gears and hunker down on the curb for some quality pre-clocking-in time.
“First round’s on me,” I offer up.
“You shouldn’t have,” Deak says.
“What’s mine is yours.” Which is to say we’ve all got a lot of nothing. I definitely can’t afford anything in Carytown. All these shops are way overpriced. Chichi boutiques, home décor emporiums, fancy candles. This block of Richmond is for the Southsiders who want to cross the James River, slip into the safest stretch of downtown, and shop till they plop.
Our bike crew is definitely not Carytown clientele. Even the coffee is too expensive. Luckily, we’ve got Jenn- darling, angelic Jenn- hooking us up whenever she opens.
Betsy’s Coffee Shop is situated right at the corner of Cary and S. Auburn. Betsy always turns a blind eye to Jenn doling out of the Danishes nobody else wants to eat. She’s got a soft spot for couriers. Who can blame her? We’re sweating charm out of every pore.
On the mornings Jenn opens the store, she’ll serve us all up a cup and hand out whatever didn’t get eaten the day before, as long as we tip something. We’ve become intimately aware of her work schedule because, well . . . we all need to eat, now, don’t we?
There’s five of us most mornings. Couriers come and go, depending on how many bones get broken—all in a day’s work—but when it comes to the true hardcore Saddle Sores, you’ve got me, Deak, Lysistrata, and Freel. We’ve been riding through Richmond for the last couple years, all of us working for the same messenger company—Hell on Wheels—divvying the city up into sections and delivering whatever needs dispatching that day. Hell of a lot faster than UPS. Fuck FedEx. These streets are ours.
We all meet in the morning, smoke a cig, down some fresh joe until our throats burn, throw bagel bricks at each other, hacky sack that shit for a bit before gearing up and go go going. The others never notice why I’m always the first to arrive when we meet at Betsy’s. The assumption is I’m punctual. The truth is, I’ve been waking up next to Jenn.
“Your friends still don’t know about us, do they?”
“Friends?” I muttered into the pillow, still not entirely present. Waking up is not a strength of mine, I’ll admit. The ache of the day carries over. Drains me. All that riding.
“Your bike buddies.”
“Bike buddies? What are we? Ten?”
“Sure act like it.”
Earlier this morning, not two hours ago. I was still half asleep, tangled up in her bedsheets, face buried in her pillow. She’s already getting dressed, a breath away from heading out the door. I’m not getting the message that I’m supposed to move my ass. Her roommates don’t take too kindly to unchaperoned beaus wandering about the apartment. Particularly ones who raid the fridge in everyone’s absence, draining the OJ in their boxers.
“You ever gonna tell them?” Jenn slips on a collared shirt. She keeps her ink where her sleeves swallow them up, a barricade of cotton tucking her tattoos out of sight whenever she’s at work, as if she has to hide them from her customers. Hide herself.
“What’s there to tell?” I rub my face, feeling that sandpaper scrape.
“Really? So that’s how you feel about me?”
It’s not like I’ve been purposefully keeping her a secret. Not entirely, at least. The truth is it’s hard to bring someone into this riding lifestyle who isn’t a lane drifter already.
I’m not about to get all mystical here, but I will say this: Riding is a way of life.
My life, at least.
It’s difficult to explain to someone who isn’t a part of this world. To most folks, we’re just a nuisance. People see nothing but a bunch of punks on their bikes, tearing through traffic. They don’t know what it’s like to feel the tug of gravity on their fixed gear, weave down the street through the flow of vehicles, drifting along all that metal, glass, and steel. Like riding with whales. The behemoths of the streets. Your pulse picks up and you know, you just know, you’re not simply riding your bike through the city . . . you’re gliding along the borderline between life and death, racing against your own mortality. The Grim Reaper’s at your back, chasing you down on his pale little pony, and you’re simply kicking his ass, blue ribbon-style. Bike couriering isn’t just a job, it’s the only way I know how to feel alive.
Buy on Amazon Kindle | Audible | Paperback | Bookshop.org
Abou the Author
Clay McLeod Chapman is the author of Wake Up and Open Your Eyes, Kill Your Darling, Stay on the Line, What Kind of Mother, Ghost Eaters, Whisper Down the Lane, The Remaking, and miss corpus. He has been nominated for the Bram Stoker and Shirley Jackson Award.
Quiet Part Loud, a 12-part horror podcast from Jordan Peele/Monkeypaw Productions, written by Chapman and Mac Rogers, is available on Spotify.
Chapman was educated at the North Carolina School of the Arts for Drama, the Burren College of Art, and Sarah Lawrence College. He currently teaches writing at The Actors Studio MFA Program at Pace University.
Devil Inside is his most recent novel.
