Epic vampire novels, a roadside mummy, hauntings and horrors; either it’s Halloween season or Douglas Clegg. Wait! It’s both!!!

I am thrilled to have caught up with bestselling horror writer Douglas Clegg this week! Currently Douglas is handing out treats for Halloween by way of a full length novel, online and for FREE!

I asked if he had time for a quick interview and was lucky enough to get one! We’re here talking about his free novel that you can find here-
http://www.scribd.com/doc/6079898/Afterlife-by-Douglas-Clegg

COS: What is the main story of this book?
DC: In Afterlife, Julie Hutchinson is a woman driven to the edge of sanity when a brutal murder ignites a series of psychic invasions at her home. But these paranormal occurrences begin to raise questions about her husband — and a mysterious government program for psychic children that he might have been involved with many years before. She’s looking for answers, and she finds them in a mysterious and charismatic figure named Michael Diamond.

COS: How did you come up with the idea for the book?
DC: A friend told me that she had discovered a secret life that her husband had for their entire marriage. She had been in the dark on who he really was, and that sparked the idea for me of someone like my heroine, Julie Hutchinson, who begins to suspect that she doesn’t know her husband as well as she had thought.

Also, I had people close to me die and went through questions about just what the afterlife can mean to people who are alive, here, and have to handle both grief and a strange sense that nobody ever leaves us.

I was living in New Jersey when I wrote it and drove out to these beautiful mountains there and also discovered a kind of lake district — an hour by car from Manhattan. I began to wonder what it was like living out there, and I wondered “What if a nice suburban house by a lake would become a place for astral and psychic interference?”

And finally, I’d been reading about remote viewing experiments that the U.S. government and military may or may not have ever carried out. Somehow, it all came together, and I wrote out the final two paragraphs. After that I wrote the rest of the novel leading up to those two paragraphs.

COS: Why are you giving this book away for free?
DC: Free takes away the resistance for a reader to try a book. Digital downloads make it easy for anyone online to give a novel a try — so I decided to do this with Afterlife, which already came out in hardcover and paperback. I’m hoping that readers who enjoy it seek out my other novels and stories — whether at the library or bookstore or online.

Additionally, I’ve promised my newsletter subscribers at DouglasClegg.com that if Afterlife reached at least 10,000 downloads by Halloween night, I’d launch a new email serial novel in 2009. I launched the internet’s first serial novel in 1999 — called Naomi — and so I felt it was high time for another one on the tenth year anniversary of the first.