Guest Author: Bernita Harris

Bernita Harris, author of Dark and Disorderly, has been kind enough to stop by Reading with Tequila to tell us about differed types of ghosts.

Thank you so much for the invitation to guest post today; and thank you again and again for your intelligent, thoughtful, acute review of Dark and Disorderly.

All of us have heard ghost stories, accounts of spectral visitations, eerie events and prophetic dreams. Tales about the spirits of the dead haunting the living exist in every culture. And many of us have had--if not a personal encounter with apparitions--then brief moments when a sense of otherness, of something unseen, have raised the hair on the back of our necks and make us catch our breath. Moments that make us, not matter how logical and rational our subsequent response, temporary believers in the paranormal. Ever after we wonder about psychic powers, hauntings and poltergeists. About the unknown.

The world in which exorcist Lillie St. Claire exercises her Talent in Dark and Disorderly is not that much different from our own. Except that here, the paranormal becomes normal and ghosts walk--for real.

In our world, those who do more than wonder about paranormal events , those who investigate such scientific anomalies are parapsychologists. By collecting instances of paranormal phenomena, they have classified spirits and specters into several categories. I have relied on these categories for the novel and based my ghosts on variations of actual accounts. In her capacity as exorcist to rid the town of Waredale of its paranormal plague, Lillie challenges several of the more common and familiar types of ghosts in Dark and Disorderly.

One is the recording type of apparition, a spectral play-back repetition of some past event. Famous examples include armies at Edgehill, England, and Catherine Howard, one of Henry VIII's wives at Hampton Court. These "recordings" are not always or only visual. Screams and groans, heavy breathing, the sound of footsteps down a hall or on the stairs figure in this type of ghostly activity. Called to exorcise an audio ghost--which her Talent allows her to see as well as hear--Lillie discovers, not a jailhouse suicide as everyone assumed, but a murder.

A scarier type of apparition is the interactive ghost. Unlike the recorder ghosts, these spirits are aware. They may converse with the living, asking and answering questions. Further they may be more or less mobile and not constrained by a particular setting. They may appear as bewildered entities or as stubborn souls determined to finish earthly business. They may seem constrained to warn the living. They may be victims of some terrible event, waiting for justice--or they may be perpetrators whose lust for horror and evil extends beyond the grave.

Among other paranormal manifestations, Lillie must deal with several interactive ghosts, both innocent and damned, in Dark and Disorderly. And sometimes, she learns too much about the living from the dead...

About the Author

I write. I blog. A green frog lives by the fountain in in my garden. I have not kissed him - yet. My paranormal suspense, DARK AND DISORDERLY, will be released by Carina Press in June, 2010.

About the Book

"I was standing there naked when my dead husband walked into my bathroom..."

Lillie St. Claire is a Talent, one of the rare few who can permanently dispatch the spirits of the dead that walk the earth. Her skills are in demand in a haunted country, where a plague of ghosts is becoming a civic nuisance.

Those skills bring her into conflict with frightened citizens who view Talents as near-demons. Her husband comes to see her as a Freak; so when Nathan dies after a car crash, she is relieved to be free of his increasingly vicious presence. Lillie expects to be haunted by Nathan's ghost, but not to become Suspect #1 for her husband's murder and reanimation.

But what's most surprising of all is the growing attraction between her and psi-crime detective John Thresher. He thinks that Lillie killed Nathan--and Nathan must agree, because his zombie is seeking revenge. Now she and Thresher must work together to solve her husband's murder--before his corpse kills her...

Bernita's blog

Reading with Tequila's review of Dark and Disorderly