Aaron D McClelland

Betwixt Aaron D McClelland

There is a razor thin space between life and death, between existence and oblivion, between heaven and hell. A place caught between light and darkness, a crimson clouded world frozen in Longtime.

When Max Brandt finds himself burning with fever from a deadly infection and steps off a rapid transit train to find somewhere to die in peace, he lands in the realm of the dead. Natural law is twisted there; water flows from disconnected pipes, buildings reconstruct themselves by growing upward from the ground brick by brick, food appears fresh seemingly out of nowhere. Whatever vanishes in the real world arrives there, including a WWI Zeppelin.

Everyone Max meets is a walking anachronism; a British Colonial Officer killed during an Indian uprising, a Dead Rabbit from the Five Points stabbed to death in a street brawl, a samurai who lost his final battle, a gunslinger hanged for a horse-thief, and a 17 year old hippie named Olive who died at the Monterey Pop Festival from a heroin overdose as Jefferson Airplane performed White Rabbit.

Max has joined the dead.

Yet like the real world there is evil and horror in this place; tribes of cannibals haunt the ruins of a city with many names, Caribou man and his cult make human sacrifices to the crow gods they worship, and a Baptist Preacher who believes he is on a mission from his god to raise the dead and return to vanquish the real world.

All reside and will clash within this narrow band of existence called Betwixt.

A deathpunk novel of ghosts, wraiths, zombies, and zeppelins ...

BETWIXT (where the dead things go)