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Rachel M. Martens

Cosmic, Gothic & Occult

Poe: Haunted Souls

Poe is tired of losing people, tired of funerals and failure. In the six weeks since she buried her foster mother, she has worked relentlessly to transform herself into a different kind of dangerous, someone strong enough to fight for her loved ones and win instead of someone made up of broken pieces and sharp edges. It’s exhausting sometimes relearning how to believe in yourself and in other people, relearning how to be human, but Poe is determined.

Responding to an ominous series of letters from her estranged grandparents, the wealthy Blackwings who snubbed her family’s funeral so many years ago, is not on Poe’s priority list, but with so little family left she can’t ignore her grandparents’ plea for one last chance to meet their granddaughter and make amends before they die, not even when it means traveling far from Baltimore to Savannah, Georgia, the most haunted city in America.

In Savannah, the dead walk, and even an old enemy whose memory Poe has tried so hard to bury comes back to haunt her. Arming herself with supernatural talismans and a newfound iron will, Poe ventures into the Otherworld to fight her demons where they are most powerful...but can she prevail? Or will she be doomed to an afterlife as yet another specter haunting Savannah’s cobblestone streets?

Cosmic, Gothic & Occult

Poe: Nevermore

A curse...a shattered soul...sanity: nevermore!

Poe: Nevermore is an Edgar Allan Poe-inspired gothic thriller in which a young woman must race against time and death to save those she loves while struggling with depression, a new relationship complicated by her past, and an abusive former foster-father. Nevermore, the first in a six-book series, is told by Elenora Allison Poe, or "Poe" for short. Poe is twenty-four years old, drowning in debt and depression, and very alone, having been orphaned at the age of two and raised in an unloving household. Suffering from insomnia and PTSD from a traumatic experience seven years before, Poe keeps everyone at arm's length. Then, she meets homicide detective Caleb Frost and her life changes dramatically. Frost sees Poe's brokenness in perfect clarity and sympathizes with her. However, just when Poe is starting to let him in, she discovers a horrible truth: she is the sole direct descendant of Edgar Allan Poe, inheriting not only the last name of one of the world's most famous poets, but also a terrible family curse that takes the form of the master of the macabre's most haunting tales. If Poe cannot recognize the curse unfolding in time, it will destroy the lives of all those close to her and annihilate her sanity.

Dark Romance

Metalhead

"You're going to hate me by the end of this...but I can't help myself. You're going to kill me, beautiful."

Metalhead is a music-injected adrenaline rush of a YA paranormal romance in which good girl Trish falls in love with the tattooed guitarist she tutors and unleashes a force powerful enough to burn the world down. Loving Axl Varness isn't easy, even if he is the first person to love Trish for who she is inside and build her up instead of tearing her down. If Trish wants to hold onto her new paramour and her own fragile self-esteem, she'll need to contend with an abusive boyfriend and a school full of bullies.

Meanwhile, Axl has never had much self-control and trying to protect the girl he loves is pushing him to his breaking point...and if Axl loses control everyone around him will be in mortal peril. As easily as he can play a riff on his guitar, Axl can bring pieces of his soul to life...and some of those pieces would love nothing more than brutal, bloody vengeance.

Ready to lose control?

Cosmic, Gothic & Occult

Poe: Rest in Peace

The shocking and fast-paced sequel to Nevermore, Rest in Peace picks up with Elenora Allison Poe one month after the first novel's conclusion. Frost and Poe are still recovering from the tragedies they survived in "The Raven", both emotionally and physically. As they struggle to rebuild their relationship from ashes, Poe discovers that she is being stalked by her most wicked nightmare, Lex, and is swept into a maelstrom of instability and paranoia. Without Frost's protection, Poe quickly loses her already shaky grip on her sanity as with each passing moment the inevitable reunion with her tormentor draws nearer. Meanwhile, the Poe family curs

Horror Anthologies/Short Stories

The Wrought Iron Gate

“That’s why I do this job. To find places that are seriously wrong.”

Sydney Blake has been debunking so-called "haunted houses" for ten years, but she may have finally met her match with 1366 Cumberland Street. This dilapidated manor house in Bangor, Maine has a century-old history of suspicious deaths and disappearances and when Sydney arrives looking to do what she always does, she quickly comes to realize that there is something deeply wrong with this place. As she explores the house, the past Sydney has worked so hard to forget and forgive herself for comes back to vengeful life...and this time, she might not be able to escape it.

A short haunted house story, "The Wrought Iron Gate" was originally published in Midnight Hour: A Compilation of Short Horror Tales in 2017 by Rachel M. Martens.

Horror Anthologies/Short Stories

Midnight Hour

Midnight Hour is a compilation of short horror fiction that explores different types of darkness with each tale coming to a consensus: darkness is a thread weaving throughout our lives that we cannot deny or escape. The book includes a shudder-inducing haunted house tale, "The Wrought Iron Gate", a classic Gothic tale, "The Long Black Dress", a glimpse of modern horror in the novella "So Broken", and more.

Cosmic, Gothic & Occult

Poe: Death’s Mark

The much-anticipated follow-up to Rest in Peace, Death's Mark finds Poe, Frost and Trina healing and seeking a new normal to found their lives on. But for Poe, there may never be a "new normal." The only other direct descendant of Edgar Allan Poe, a twenty-year-old girl named Tori, is seeking answers about her lineage, answers Poe only wishes she had. Meanwhile, Poe’s former foster-father has grown progressively more volatile and his actions are crushing his submissive wife to the point of threatening her very existence. Poe can hardly protect herself and her new patchwork family from Jonathon Aaron, much less find a way to rescue her helpless foster-mom from the clutches of the curse, and must choose between the people she loves most. Concluding with an epic final stand-off between Poe and the man who destroyed her childhood, Death's Mark depicts the tragic heroine's first hope for a future and her battle to hold onto that hope.

Mystery & Suspense

Patriots’ Dance

Leia DiAngeles’s first experience of terrorism was losing both her parents at Ground Zero on September 11th, 2001. Twenty years later, she is an FBI counterterrorism analyst hunting a right-wing extremist group and the terrorist who does its dirty work, a man called The Butcher. When a traffic camera finally snaps a photo of The Butcher’s face, Leia is horrified to discover that the boogeyman she’s been chasing is actually a decorated American soldier who has been tortured, brainwashed, and ultimately forced to do a terrorist organization’s evil bidding. When Leia’s findings land her in the enemy’s crosshairs, she joins forces with the man she saved, Sergeant James “Jamie” Goldt, in a desperate bid to dismantle the organization that destroyed his life, prevent any further attack on an America on the brink of civil war, and rescue the prisoners still suffering in the bowels of a Washington, D.C. prison…even if it means taking on tyrants inside the government Leia dedicated her life to serving, tyrants who would go so far as to create a fake terrorist organization and commit very real acts of violence to achieve their wicked goals.

Horror Anthologies/Short Stories

The Long Black Dress

"There is no greater Hell than watching a man who loves you more than his own soul, one whom you love more than your own soul, deteriorate into a monster."

"The Long Black Dress" is a short tale of gothic horror told by a young woman returning to an empty home after her husband's funeral. In the oppressive and sentient silence of the hollow house, she descends into grief-fueled memories of their relationship and its tragic end, culminating in a haunting ending.

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