Purgatory Spit Out Its Souls on Eden, Texas. Now There’s Hell to Pay.

Popular Young Adult novelist Ann Swann and WordCrafts Press are thrilled to announce the launch of the intense new YA horror series, Apocalypse in Eden, with the re-release of Swann’s 2016 novel, TAKERS, in hardback, trade paperback, and all major ebook formats. Fans can look forward to the sequel, SEEKERS, in the fall of 2022 and the final volume in the trilogy, REMAINDERS, this winter.

Told through the eyes of a fourteen-year-old boy named Jack, TAKERS is a horror story of a group of people who must find a way to survive after a parallel dimension dubbed Purgatory rips open the sky and spits its inhabitants into their midst. Jack, an unwilling leader; finds himself forced to perform tasks he never would have imagined before the rip. But with the help of a motley crew of survivors, including a deaf dog named Snake—and odd brain-blasts of classic rock-n-roll—he grows into the guy who can make decisions that save their little band from annihilation by the creatures he calls… Takers.

“I wrote the creatures, the ones Jack labels Takers, as soul-seekers,” author Ann Swann explains.” It has always fascinated me that some people seem to be innately good, and some innately bad. What causes this? Do some people have no souls? Did they lose them somewhere? Trade them away, sell them in a deal with the devil? Is there any way to know? What if they wore their sins like internal, changeable, tattoos—would that help identify the nature of their souls?”

“Furthermore, would they change their natures if they could?” she muses. “Would Ted Bundy? Jeffrey Dahmer? Hitler? We label them all as sociopaths and/or psychopaths and try to identify reasons for their murderous natures, but we can’t explain them completely. Maybe it’s simply good vs evil the way the Good Book says. I have so many allegories in this book (alligators, my students used to call them) that I would love for readers to identify them and discuss them in their book clubs. And tell me about them, too!

From the Novel

Instead of searching for crepe paper to decorate the gym for the dance, I pulled over an empty bucket to sit on, opened Cade’s computer, and pulled up one of my favorite nerdy science websites. Dr. D’s Adventures in Dimensions was run by a university professor who tried to use physics to explain the unexplainable.

The website sprang to life. Then the lights went out.

For a moment, my skin tightened up around me like an old leather glove, but then I remembered the wind. It sometimes messed with the power in our little town. Thankfully I still had the laptop’s screen light. I figured the power would come back on in a few minutes like it always did.

I glanced back down at Dr. D. He didn’t sound like an astrophysicist. In fact, his voice was downright shrill.

“Listen,” he demanded. “Our universe and the one paralleling it have been expanding at different rates. The fabric between them is growing too thin. The dimensions are colliding. The fabric is shredding—”

He removed his glasses, his eyes growing wider and wilder as he spoke. He glanced over his shoulder as if he heard someone approaching. “Get underground. You might be safe underground!”

Doctor D stalked about, tugging at his Einstein hair. The LOW BATTERY message appeared, and the computer winked off.

About the Author

Ann Swann lives and dreams in the oil fields of West Texas. She loves her family and her pets and wants to live near the ocean someday. She also adores books, movies, fast cars, and music. Ann wonders if she may have been a teen boy in a previous incarnation. In addition to her two e-readers, Ann has a stack of to-be-read books so tall she calls it Herman, as in Munster.