When demonic aliens kill his father and transport 15-year-old Paul
Chapman, his sister, and mother to Hell as slaves, he learns just how far
he’ll go to survive, get revenge, and regain his freedom.
After killing his father, a marauding band of alien demons captures
15-year-old Paul Chapman, his mother, and his twin sister. Taken as slaves
and food to Hell, a planet orbiting a nearby star, their survival is
extraordinarily difficult and far from certain. As the years pass, Paul
learns he only has two choices: live as a powerless slave or die as food
for his masters. How much must Paul collaborate with his demon masters to
survive?
Hell Holes 4: A Slave's Revenge is a prequel to the first three books in
the series. Paul Chapman, its protagonist, is also a character in Hell
Holes 3: To Hell and Back.
The beautiful young photojournalist, Aileen O’Shannon, is not who she
seems. For centuries, she has been a demon hunter, a sorceress who has
tracked and killed small bands of demons that occasionally crossed
into our world. But that changed when she joined Dr. Jack Oswald’s
expedition to study one of hundreds of huge holes that mysteriously
appeared overnight in the frozen tundra north of the Arctic
Circle.Instead of small sporadic incursions, hordes of demons now pour
from these hell holes like water from a sieve. With bombing little
more than a losing game of whack-a-mole, Earth’s armies are unable to
destroy the portals. When Jack suggests a desperate plan, he is
drafted to join Aileen and a team of other sorcerers and Army Rangers
to travel to the demon homeworld. Once there, they will unleash a
plague virus and set off a nuclear bomb to destroy the portal complex.
It’s a suicide mission. But Aileen has given Jack’s wife her word to
bring him back safely, and the demons have already killed three men
under her protection. Just how far will Aileen go to avoid losing
another?
When hundreds of huge holes mysteriously appeared overnight in
the frozen tundra north of the Arctic Circle, geologist Jack
Oswald picked Angele Menendez, his climatologist wife, to
determine if the record temperatures due to climate change was
the cause. But the holes were not natural. They were unnatural
portals for an invading army of demons. Together with Aileen
O'Shannon, a 1,700-year-old sorceress demon-hunter, the three
survivors of the research team sent to study the holes had only
one chance: to flee down the dangerous Dalton Highway towards
the relative safety of Fairbanks. However, the advancing horde
of devils, imps, hellhounds, and gargoyles will stop at nothing
to prevent their prey from escaping. It is a 350-mile race with
simple rules. Win and live; lose and die...
It’s August in Alaska, and geology professor Jack Oswald
prepares for the new school year. But when hundreds of huge
holes mysteriously appear overnight in the frozen tundra north
of the Arctic Circle, Jack receives an unexpected phone call.
An oil company exec hires Jack to investigate, and he picks
his climatologist wife and two of their graduate students as
his team. Uncharacteristically, Jack also lets Aileen
O’Shannon, a bewitchingly beautiful young photojournalist,
talk him into coming along as their photographer. When they
arrive in the remote oil town of Deadhorse, the exec and a
biologist to protect them from wild animals join the team.
Their task: to assess the risk of more holes opening under the
Trans-Alaska Pipeline and the wells and pipelines that feed
it. But they discover a far worse danger lurks below. When it
emerges, it threatens to shatter Jack’s unshakable faith in
science. And destroy us all…
The idea for this book series came to
me when I first heard of the discovery of several large mysterious holes in the
permafrost of the Yamal Peninsula in Northern Siberia in mid-July of 2014. By
the summer of 2015, some 20 to 30 such holes had been spotted. As in the book,
scientists have measured high levels of methane gas in the holes. The holes are
mysterious because of their large size, their existence in frozen ground
(permafrost), their steep cylindrical shapes, and the fact that the contents of
the holes is nowhere to be found.
There is no scientific consensus as to
their cause. Scientific explanations have ranged from the explosive release of
methane from buried methane hydrate ice to the melting of pingos (i.e., large
dirt-covered plugs of ice) due to rising temperatures from Global Climate
Change. Other less-believable proposed explanations have included meteor
strikes and alien excavations. The best current scientific explanation is that
as warming temperatures melt the ice in pingos, the pressure on the underlying
methane hydrate ice decreases, causing methane explosions that blow out the
soil that once topped the pingos. The holes are essentially the voids left
behind once the pingo’s ice has melted.
The Hell Holes series is based on the
following scenario: (1) thousands of such holes begin to show up around the
entire Arctic including Alaska, (2) these holes were even larger than the
initial ones in Siberia, and (3) there really is an “alien” connection with the
holes.
For more information on the real
Siberian holes, see:
Donald Firesmith is a multi-award-winning author of
speculative fiction including science fiction (alien
invasion), fantasy (magical wands), and modern urban
paranormal novels.
Prior to recently retiring to devote himself full-time to
his novels, Donald Firesmith earned an international
reputation as a distinguished engineer, authoring seven
system/software engineering books based on his 40+ years
spent developing large, complex software-intensive
systems.
He lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with his wife Becky,
his son Dane, and varying numbers of dogs and cats.
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Please try not to spam posts with the same comments over and over again. Authors like seeing thoughtful comments about their books, not the same old, "I like the cover" or "sounds good" comments. While that is nice, putting some real thought and effort in is appreciated. Thank you.