This has been a busy month for us, so I am late in posting this, but we are excited to announce that  Hell’s Well by Sean Patrick Hazlett (a tale of the Lone Pine Mountain Devil) released on November 21. This volume was featured as an exclusive bundle in the November Cryptid Crate. Copies can also be ordered via the eSpec Books online store.

There are creatures lurking in our world. Obscure creatures long relegated to myth and legend. They have been sighted by a lucky—or unlucky—few, some have even been photographed, but their existence remains unproven and unrecognized by the scientific community.

These creatures, long thought gone, have somehow survived; creatures from our nightmares haunting the dark places. They swim in our lakes and bays, they soar the night skies, they hunt in the woods. Some are from our past, and some from other worlds, and others have always been with us—watching us, fearing us, hunting us.

These are the cryptids, and Systema Paradoxa tells their tales.

***

Astrophysicist Dr. Kate Gavin Weaver’s life was hard enough fighting for tenure at Caltech while raising a four-year-old daughter as a single mother. It was even harder living under the shadow of her estranged father, Mack Gavin, the host of the wildly popular television series, The Cryptid Hunter.

But when Mack disappears while researching the subject of his next episode in a secluded wilderness town in California, Kate decides to leave the relative safety of Pasadena to find her father.

What she uncovers there shakes the very foundation of her reality and forces her to grapple with an adversary she could’ve never imagined.

Sean Patrick Hazlett is a technologist, finance professional, and science fiction, fantasy, horror, and non-fiction author and editor working in Silicon Valley. He is a winner of the Writers of the Future Contest, and over forty of his short stories have appeared in publications such as The Year’s Best Military and Adventure SF, Year’s Best Hardcore Horror, Terraform, Galaxy’s Edge, Writers of the Future, Grimdark Magazine, Vastarien, and Abyss & Apex, among others. He is also the editor of the Weird World War III and Weird World War IV anthologies. He is also an active member of the Horror Writers Association.

In graduate school, Sean assisted future Secretary of Defense Ashton B. Carter at the Harvard-Stanford Preventive Defense Project where he developed strategic options for confronting Iran’s nuclear program. For this analysis, he won the 2006 Policy Analysis Exercise Award at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Sean also worked as an intelligence analyst focusing on strategic war games and simulations for the Pentagon, where he drew on his experience training the US military as a cavalry officer in the US Army during the Iraq and Afghan wars.

Sean holds a Master of Business Administration from Harvard Business School, a Master in Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and bachelor’s degrees in History and Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.