Description:
A soldier prays for a mentor to train him to be a hero... what he gets is the dark sorcerer who killed thousands of them. Gideon Halcyon is a young man who wants nothing more than to save his people from the hordes 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. Gideon is helpless in the face of extinction itself......until he meets Ashkelon.Coming from the Void beyond the world, Ashkelon alone survives the world he left in ruins. Cynical and ruthless, the last lord of the Everlasting Dark 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 to exceed even the exacting standards of the 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 just another scream in the murderer's black blade.As Hell consumes the hopes of Man, a hero is forged in darkness. Read it today.
Review "Armed with a spiraling, action-driven plot, wickedly entertaining characters and bloodthirsty prose, this ambitious novel hums with sinister intent. The immersive nature of the writing and the impossibly high stakes of the story make it impossible to put this book down in the middle of a chapter." -Self-Publishing Review"In Darkness Cast delivers an exciting story of good vs evil following strong characters to thought-provoking thematic conclusions." -Periapsis Press?"Complicated mythology...graphic battle scenes...intriguing narrative. A blood-spattered fantasy that features several strong characters." -Kirkus Reviews"...the writing is vivid in its descriptions of horrors and the battles against them. Shuerger's story explores what it means to be a hero..." -Indiereader From the Author 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. About the Author Jonathan Shuerger is a Marine Corps veteran and author with a passion for telling stories and making people laugh. His first book, The Exorcism of Frosty the Snowman, was released in 2017. He lives in Tucson, AZ, with his wife and three daughters, who moonlight as domestic terrorists in their free time. Jonathan war-games, DMs tabletop RPGs, and slays it at Smash Bros. and Mario Kart, like every dad should.
