Dark Fantasy, Filled with Necromancers, Cults, Inept Romantic Endeavors, and the Occasional Game of Boulderchuck – a Sport as Simple as its Name

WILL THE EVENTS PUT IN MOTION BY A GHASTLY FINANCIAL REPORT END IN SLOOT'S GRISLY DEATH? ALMOST DEFINITELY. IS THAT THE WORST THING THAT COULD HAPPEN? ALMOST DEFINITELY NOT.    

You've got to have rules. According to the good folk of the Old Country, they're all that's holding the dismal tide at bay. Start coloring outside the lines, and it all comes tumbling down.

No one in the Old Country follows the rules half as well as Sloot, who has never so much as given alms to a beggar without getting a certified receipt. He has his entire life worked out to the very end and is looking forward to making as faint a mark on the world as possible. Everything is going according to plan. Of course, "everything going according to plan" is perhaps the single most precarious state of affairs available. Nowhere to go from there but down. There you are, safe as houses, and then boom. Things don't just end in disaster, they take up with other disasters, get matching leather jackets, and start harassing old ladies walking home from the market.

            In Sam Hooker’s sophomore humorous dark fantasy novel, Peril in the Old Country [Black Spot Books, June 5 2018], Sloot’s utter ruination takes root when he is asked to correct the worst financial report ever written. While his corrections avert a global economic crisis, had he known what he was setting in motion, he might have instead bought economic crisis a drink to see if there was anything there.

Things turn from bad to worse when Sloot finds out that he might not be the true and loyal citizen of the Old Country he’d always thought he was. His newest acquaintance will draw him into a web of intrigue, and everyone knows that accountants don’t do intrigue. It never fits into the ledgers properly. Sloot will have to set aside his affinity for the rules and go up against underworld kingpins, secret societies, the undead, bloodthirsty cannibals from Carpathia, and even the ruthless Vlad the Invader! If that weren't enough, the steely gaze of Mrs. Knife follows him wherever he goes. Does she really want to murder him, or does she just have one of those faces?

At least Sloot's misadventures bring Myrtle into his life. She has the sort of smile that makes him want to stand up straighter and invest in some cologne. He's not even bothered by the fact that she's possessed by the laziest philosopher ever to have died.

When it turns out that all of his loyalties oppose each other, Sloot will have to match wits with everyone from Vikings to ogres with advanced legal degrees to sort out the madness. He’ll navigate the impossible queues of Central Bureaucracy, strike deals with the most devious denizens of the black market, and evade the massive warhammers of savage librarians, all in the name of balancing the ledgers at the end of the day.

Peril in the Old Country is a farcical tale of a dystopian fantasy, where its hero will have to traverse dungeons, brush up on his Carpathian invasion theory, and fathom why anyone would ever need a box filled with tentacles of doom if he’s to survive, which he probably won’t.

“The tricky part [of humorous dark fantasy] is finding spots where unspeakable evil is ticklish,” says Hooker. “In Peril in the Old Country, I invite readers to traipse through the darkness with me via Sloot Peril. He is the safe route personified—the answer to having asked ‘why risk it?’ dozens, maybe hundreds of times in a single life, and never coming up with a satisfactory answer. None of us are Sloot because all of us have thought ‘oh, what the heck’ at least once in our lives.”

“It’s those moments of courage, the little risks we take that prepare us all for real bravery, should we ever hear the call. When unspeakable evil steps out of the shadows and the only person to hear the call is Sloot, you get Peril in the Old Country.”