Shadow People: Quickening of the Wicked Book Cover
While disturbing and steeped in gore to gratify even the most hardcore horror enthusiast, the tale of Shadow People: Quickening of the Wicked is ripe with spiritual transcendence and aimed at adults that lean towards nonconformity and are predisposed to the horror genre. The story’s moral message is that one does not have to give up who they are; rather it is that they have the ability right within themselves to be much more than they are. They can truly live lives free from pain, want, and even old age if they would only dare override the world’s consensus of thought that they can’t and believe they can.
Earth, a resplendent and pristine garden paradise, spins now swathed and tainted with violence and disease, pain and poverty, greed and apathy. Like a dark, murky halo, misery radiates outwards from the splendid sphere, dense and heavy into the ethers. It is the Ancient Ones who recognize the formation of the massive shadow as an entity of all earth’s suffering and sorrow. It is fashioned of fear and it is the essence of human negativity.
From the vestiges of the ruins of Monrovia, after the catastrophic earthquake and mammoth tidal waves had guaranteed the city's utter and absolute destruction and from the pitiful suffering of fifteen homeless orphans rises up a specter of such might, with such evil intent, that none can stand before it and live. Monrovia’s indigenous residents had existed in a horrifying man made hell so torturous it was beyond mortal words. It is by their sorrow that the great shadow shrouds the city. It is by their screams that it solidifies and takes form. The phantom of woe is fear and hate and pain incarnate, and it is evolving.
This colossal shadow known as The Wraith circles the world of wretchedness. It soars high in the darkness of night, seeking out the most heinous and the most despicable of humans. It possesses many, instantly coagulating their blood, bursting their hearts, collapsing their brains. It is their detestable souls it wants. It captures their departing spirits. It alters and mutates them into black ghostly minions. Commanding its newborn shadow soldiers to destroy and multiply, they instinctively possess humans, turning them into savage, murdering zombies. Having been fashioned from a human spirit, these newly spawned shadow banshees are not as strong as their miscreant creator nor as immediately destructive to their human host bodies. The ill-fated, over-shadowed humans however, directly begin to exhibit symptoms like that of terminally advanced diseases and experience a rapid deterioration of their flesh and they cannot live to be held captive long. Their minds and wills are controlled supreme with extreme violent tendencies; their only mandate is to kill. These senseless zombies, with broken and decaying bodies pushed beyond their corporal limits are unable to find release even in death. At the demise of their pawns, the shadows quickly transmute the departing spirits into shadow people thus expediting the shadow and the zombie population exponentially around the globe. The shadows, indestructible and hindered only by light and sunshine, seek to eradicate all humans and their lower life co-habitants.
Offering hope to a world immersed in fear, the story is character driven by three individuals aligned along the west coast of northern California. The story alternates between these three, on separate paths in cities far removed and in lives most dissimilar, as they seek physically and spiritually to find each other, for collectively they share one destiny.
Grace, in a constant state of debilitating anxiety and mortification at her disfigurement, she herself is not aware of her splendor. She escapes nineteen years of hell only to find she faces untold horrors more frightening than her vicious parents ever were. She clings to the hope of the reality of a mystical man that came to her during her time of fire and dreams and promised to return and take her away. However, time cruelly presses in on her and her time in this world may not be long endured.
For Lily, a tragedy beyond imagining shatters her perfect world. Blind and only five years old, she finds herself alone, lost, and hunted by unspeakable terror in a cold and forbidding forest. Her only hope of surviving even a few more hours is Grace, who has yet to realize the little girl is real.
Aeden is startlingly handsome and the epitome of cool. Most women are uncontrollably attracted to him; many men want to emulate him, while others only fear him. At an astonishing 397 years old, he appears to be no more than 23. Moving at the speed of thought, eternally youthful and with power beyond imagining, he possesses the strength and supremacy of a vampire, yet he is not. Possessing all the hypnotic romance of fictitious vampirism sans the need for blood, Aeden, in our real world, is possible.
As authors, Cindy JACKSON and Stacy STEPHENS are a mother/daughter team and are long time, avid readers of both horror fiction and spiritual non-fiction. Stacy brings the freshness of originality and the enthusiasm of youth. Since learning to put pen to paper as a young child, she has crafted numerous tales of suspense and horror. Cindy brings years of life experience and extensive metaphysical study. For more than twenty years, she has translated and paraphrased some of the most esoteric and complicated metaphysical precepts into simpler words that young people can easily comprehend. Both reside in the California Bay Area.
