Patrick Varine’s debut novel, Chupacabra, is now available as a digital novel through the Amazon Digital Publishing Service for only $9.93.
Description: Southern Delaware was just the right place for homicide detective Jack Trappone and his family. He traded in hundreds of murders a year in his native Baltimore for the relatively sleepy streets of Redden Lake, where he spends his days fielding complaints about the town’s illegal immigrants and occasionally catching a case.
But lately, his days and nights are getting darker.
A dangerous gang is making inroads into the local drug market. A strangely-dressed, badly-mutilated body has turned up in the woods. While Jack is sure it’s gang-related, some of the folks in the Hispanic neighborhood think it is the work of the ‘chupacabra,’ a Central American monster that most people consider to be nothing more than an urban legend.
As he investigates the case, Jack joins several other Redden Lake residents in following the rabbit-hole deeper than they can imagine, into a terrifying world where their nightmares are more real than they know.
Patrick Varine, a former Southern Delaware resident, chose the First State as the setting for his first novel. “I spent six years living and working in southern Delaware, and the dynamic between longtime Sussex County residents and the growing Hispanic population seemed to work perfectly as the background for the story,” he said.
Chupacabra is a fictional novel which incorporates elements of Mayan mythology, murder/mystery and horror genres.
“I wanted to write a horror-based mystery with a wholly original bent to it,” Varine said. “Vampires are the flavor-of-the-month when it comes to modern horror storytelling, but I wanted to go in a different direction, hopefully one that will be fresh for readers.”
While the story is based in Sussex County, it is certainly not based in fact.
“A while back, there were rumors that a dangerous gang called MS-13 was making inroads into Sussex, so I ran with that as part of the story,” Varine said. “Although, to the best of my knowledge, there were never any rumors of the legendary Central American ‘goatsucker’ running around the Redden State Forest!”
Varine also chose to publish Chupacabra as an exclusively digital novel, as opposed to the traditional printed book, and encouraged other aspiring authors to “go digital.”
“In the current economic climate, publishers are even more hesitant than usual to take a chance on a new author, and while subsidy publishing – in which an author bears the brunt of the publishing cost – is an option, digital publishing is clearly the wave of the future, and is available at a fraction of the price of traditional book publishing.”
Chupacabra is available for the iPod, iPhone and iPad, as well as the Amazon Kindle and any home computer, by downloading Amazon’s free Kindle app.
If you’re contemplating buying Patrick Varine’s Kindle book, Chupacabra, perhaps you should know something about the title creature. As Casey Stengal might say, “you could look it up,” (in today’s parlance this would mean “Google it”). Which is what I did. I found more than I wanted to know, but to save you the trouble, the following pretty much covers it.
Chupacabras, literally “goat suckers,” are
legendary creatures said to roam Mexico,
Puerto Rico and parts of the United States,
killing livestock and the occasional human being,
tearing them to pieces, draining their blood.
Serious research does not support the existance of the Chupacabra, but the reader witnesses one in action on the first page. Not a pretty sight. But it’s too late. You’ll read on.
One might also want to know that this reviewer ordinarily wants to have the supernatural elements of fiction explained in natural terms; in other words, I prefer the ghosts, vampires, etc.,to eventually be accounted for in believable ways. Ordinarily.
But the nightmarish horrors in this novel are, within the bounds of fiction, real, and the reader must willingly suspend his disbelief. So it was with some hesitancy that I installed Kindle on my Mac and bought the book.
I’m not sorry.
Mr. Varine’s first novel is a page turner worthy of Nelson DeMille. At age 28 he has mastered the art of “hooking the reader at the end of chapters, essentially dictating a quick move to the next one.
After meeting the Chupacabra (and its hapless victim) at night in the swampy woods near the small town of Redden Lake, we are introduced to Jack Trappone, formerly a detective in west Baltimore Homicide, who has moved to Redden Lake, apparently seeking some relief from the stress of big city crime.
(Good luck with THAT, Jack.)
Redden Lake, Delaware, (fictitious) sits in Sussex County (real) and seems to have a disproportionatly Latino population, some in the U.S.A. legally, some illegally. Although they hail from all parts of Latin America, the locals tend to lump them all together as “Mexicans.”
Trappone (tru-PONE) newly arrived to bolster Redden Lake’s PD, must live with a variety of mispronunciations of his name. (“Detective Trap, Trap-on,” etc.) More signaficantly, he must endure the local predjudices and has quickly learned “that the unofficial population of Redden Lake [actually about 6,000] is directly proportional to the racism of the person giving the figures.”
In his beautifully constructed exposition, the author then begins to introduce other characters, some principal, some for background, all superbly developed. The principals seem unconnected, but, of course, we know . . .
For background there is Elmer Lingo, who sees all Latinos as a hoard of illegal, lazy, drunk Mexicans and is sure to bend Trappone’s ear, telling him he “gotta do somethng” about them.
And the first citizen Jack meets after interviewing for his new job tells him, “Redden Lake’s great. You just gotta watch out for the niggers and the spics.”
Craig George, a construction crew chief is a bit more laid back. “Hell, they’re here,” he ventures, “They wanna work. And they’re gowddamn good at it.”
My own experience informs me that this is probably an accurate insight into the attitudes of contractors who hire illegals. But I’m a senior citizen. How does Patrick Varine, age 28, know this stuff?
We learn of people the locals call “second homers, rich and retired, who were flipping their half-million dollar homes up north for a $370,000 beach house and pocketing the difference”
Then there’s Benny Brandt, pothead and reporter who gets high on weed and sex to compensate for his boring job with the newspaper, a job about to become more exciting than he might wish. To get the good stuff he needs to deal with a member of MS-13.
MS-13 (NOT fictitious; Google it), an actual international criminal gang originating in El Salvadore has set up shop in Redden Lake (THAT part’s fictitious), apparently to smooth the traffic of drugs up the eastern seaboard corridor. Residents usually know better than to interfere, but one Rafael Martinez makes the mistake of getting between a gang member and a teenager he knows and apparently wants to protect. For his pains he gets his right arm chopped off with a machete. This in public.
Just in case any witnesses or other residents didn’t get the warning, the “blackened, fly-covered arm [shows] up in the middle of Blackmon Street one sunny Tuesday afternoon.”
We meet Ignacio Cruz (Iggy), an illegal Mexican whom Trappone busts for weed but then eases off and uses him as an informer. Iggy is not serious trouble, and he’s useful in keeping an eye on MS-13
And so on, as Varine develops the charcters who’s lives, we just know, will intersect with Detective Trappone’s.
Things really begin to heat up when Trappone must investigate the murder and mutilation of a Hispanic man, whose body turns up in nearby Redden State Forest. Seems like the work of MS-13 (another warning?), but this body is unbelievably (“unnecessarily,” as one investigating officer deadpans) mangled. Among other gory details, the heart and most of the blood is missing.
By the time you get to this point in the novel, you have, as I mentioned earlier, met the goat sucker, and when Trappone sends one of his officers into the forest the next day to tail a suspect, well, you get the idea.
So with MS-13 an ever present threat to Redden Lake’s residents, a monster in the woods, a nun with her clairvoyant dreams, political corruption, agressive owls, Mayan mythology (Hmm, what else? Oh yeah, adultery and other sex), and Patrick Varine has a novel going.
One you won’t likely put down unfinished.