Ben Shadeland and Eddie Blaze are the hottest young music composers in Hollywood. Fresh off an Oscar nomination, they've just been chosen to score a big-budget horror movie by Lee Stanley, the most demanding director in film. But Ben, the creative half of the duo, hasn't written a note since his wife divorced him and got custody of their three-year-old son. Chris Blackwood is the gambling-addicted heir to the Blackwood fortune, which includes the Sorrows, an island off the coast of northern California. The island and its castle have been uninhabited since a series of gruesome, unexplained murders in 1925, but Chris needs money, and to get it he allows Ben, Eddie, Claire Harden (an aspiring composer), and Eva Rosales (Lee Stanley's gorgeous assistant) to stay a month in Castle Blackwood. Eddie is certain an eerie, isolated setting is just what Ben needs to find musical inspiration for a horror film. But what they find is more horrific than any movie.

For nearly a century Castle Blackwood lay dormant on the Sorrows, a lonely island in the Pacific. Last summer, the evil that resided within its walls was awakened. Movie music composer Ben Shadeland was lucky to escape the island with his wife and young son, but he'll soon realize that the terror is far from over. Because a godlike beast named Gabriel and the ghosts who live on the Sorrows are hungry for revenge. They will stop at nothing to bring Ben back to Castle Blackwood, and they will strike at those closest to him to fulfill their sinister plans. Accompanied by three federal officers, an L.A. detective, the newly-widowed owner of the island, a professor specializing in the occult, and a voluptuous psychic, Ben must return to the Sorrows in order to save someone he loves. Ben thought he knew what true horror was. But the new visitors have brought with them their own personal ghosts. And the beast of Castle Blackwood won't be sated until it has feasted on the blood of Ben Shadeland and everyone dear to him. FLAME TREE PRESS is the new fiction imprint of Flame Tree Publishing. Launched in 2018 the list brings together brilliant new authors and the more established; the award winners, and exciting, original voices.