You Come When I Call You

You Come When I Call You
by Douglas Clegg

About the Book:
An epic tale of horror, spanning twenty years in the lives of four friends witnesses to unearthly terror. The high desert town of Palmetto, California, has turned toxic after twenty years of nightmares. In Los Angeles, a woman is tormented by visions from a chilling past, and a man steps into a house of torture. On the steps of a church, a young woman has been sacrificed in a ritual of darkness. In New York, a cab driver dreams of demons while awake. And a man who calls himself the Desolation Angel has returned to draw his old friends back to their hometown — a town where, two decades earlier, three boys committed the most brutal of rituals, an act of such intense savagery that it has ripped apart their minds. And where, in a cavern in a place called No Man's Land, something has been waiting a long time for those who stole something more precious than life itself.

" Clegg gained attention last year for Naomi, his serialized horror novel that, arguably, was the first major work of fiction to originate in cyberspace. Genre cognoscenti, however, know him also for several acclaimed earlier novels, including The Halloween Man. Clegg's new book, which marks his first hardcover publication under his own name, is as powerful literarily and morally as anything he's written. Densely textured in plot, language and character, it tells of the 1980 destruction of the body and soul of a small desert town in California and of the resolution, 20 years later, of that supernaturally created holocaust; past and present mingle throughout, as if in a dream. The act of dreaming is a primary motif in the book, for the agent of destruction, Lamia ("lamia was fluid from steamy swamps... always feeding from the dying... until a depraved animal walking on two feet learned to pass lamia, to cultivate and worship lamia, to call it god, then demon...."), who, manifested in the body of a beautiful teenage girl, bends the reality of those upon whom she feeds, psychically and physically. Set amid the town's squalor of trailer parks, organized dogfights and fevered relationships of those with no escape, and also in the hard streets of Manhattan, a drug den in Los Angeles and elsewhere, the novel reads like a nightmare on paper as Clegg traces the fates of several of Lamia's victims. His imagery is intense, horrific, sexually violent--patricide, incestuous rape and cannibalism are among the crimes he envisions--but he paints with a poet's hand. Despite its monstrousness, his vision tenders a kind of hope; Lamia's destructive powers are balanced by another's force for healing, and, at novel's end, one victim recognizes the power of "grace." This is horror at its finest."
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Douglas Clegg is the New York Times bestselling author of The Priest of Blood, Afterlife, Nightmare House, and The Hour Before Dark, among other novels. His recent short story collection, The Machinery of Night, won a Shocker Award; and his first collection, The Nightmare Chronicles, won both the Bram Stoker Award and the International Horror Guild Award.

Clegg was born in Virginia and raised in Hawaii, Connecticut and Virginia. He has been writing fiction since childhood, but only pursued publication of it beginning in his late twenties. He has primarily written supernatural fiction -- from horror to fantasy to psychological suspense with a paranormal edge. His fiction-writing career currently spans about 20 years of constant writing and publication. Additionally, he's been Director of Marketing for a publisher, editor for a bookstore's website, a marketing consultant for publishers, publicity firms, and booksellers -- and a wrangler for the cats, dogs and rabbits that have occupied his home. He has also co-authored the book Buzz Your Book with M.J. Rose. The two have also written a screenplay together. So far, these are Clegg's only collaborations.

In 1999, Douglas Clegg launched the internet's (and world's) first publisher-sponsored e-serial novel. Called Naomi, Clegg later went on to sell both hardcover and paperback rights. In 2000, his short novel Purity became one of the most-downloaded fiction ebooks on the internet -- reaching more than 100,000 readers in its first year on the internet. In 2001, Purity became the world's-first fiction to appear on a cell phone -- and was nicknamed an M-Book at the time (for Mobile).

Clegg lives with his partner, Raul, in New England, with a small menagerie of rescued animals.

Published in two states:
• Limited Edition of 1,000 signed copies ($40)
• Traycased Lettered Edition of 52 signed and lettered copies ($175)

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