Some say a child's imaginary playmate may be his guardian angel. But what if an invisible specter is neither angel nor friend, but a demon slowly feeding on the innocence of a 6-year-old boy?
DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL is a psychological horror thriller that explores what happens when the line between reality and fantasy begins to blur, about good and evil and the presence or absence of faith.
Bobby Raines lives in constant terror of a companion he calls Mookie. When Ariel Raines learns of her husband Robert's infidelity and files for divorce, Robert succumbs to alcoholism, with its attendant grandiosity and violent mood swings. Ariel, preoccupied with her own concerns including a new man in her life, fails to act on a school psychologist's warning that her child may be in acute distress. A neighbor's house burns to the ground, the school bully is impaled by a tree branch, Robert goes missing, and still Ariel refuses to acknowledge her worst fears about her little boy until it is much too late. "Without faith, life is a journey in a paper boat on a river of flames."
As a human services planner and therapist, I wanted to write about a child consumed by a primordial demon, but when he screams for help, there's no one to hear. To me, this is a metaphor for what's happening in society today, as families continue to fly apart and children are often the hapless victims.