According to most people, monsters are nothing more than fairy tales. But sixteen-year-old Jane Smith knows better. Monsters are very real, and she is one of them.

Hiding in plain sight with their bland names, secondhand clothes, and nomadic lifestyles, Jane and her fellow monsters have lived alongside humans since the dawn of time. The key to staying alive in their world,? Avoiding humans as much as possible. According to her parents, any one of them could be out for her blood. Even her secret best friend, Dustin.

Jane has never believed the clandestine Boogeymen—a group of exterminators that have hunted her kind for centuries—to be anything more than a scary bedtime story. But when her carelessness gets her whole family taken from her, Jane sets out on a cross-country journey through the human world to find them. But even with Dustin’s help and her own natural gifts, Jane is no match for a group of ruthless monster hunters. Unless she can come up with a way to rally those who have been hidden for so long, as well as accept her true self, Jane and those she loves will become nothing more than another fairy tale.

About the Author:

I’ve been writing for about 12 years now, and A Monster Named Jane is actually my fourth book to date (although, it’s probably the first that most people will ever see).

Fantasy has always been my preferred genre, and it started with movies like Neverending Story and Labyrinth, but my love of reading fantasy really took off when I first read Tolkien. If I had to pick a point in my life when I went full-blown nerd and never looked back, it definitely began with, “In a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit.”

When I’m not writing, I’m also quite the reader as well (pretty omnivorous about what I read), and I’m also a fan of anime, comic books, good food (and beer), and going to the gym/hiking/staying active.

My thoughts on Cryptids…

Whispering winds and glowing orbs. Growing ripples over still water. A restling in the bushes just beyond the tree line. No matter what your level of belief, the lore behind cryptids is something that has gripped the imagination of humanity since we could communicate, and it’s that mixed sense of wonder and fear that inspired me to write my own version of how cryptids may be living in the world right now (actually, A Monster Named Jane was inspired directly by the episode of Supernatural entitled “Bitten”, but close enough).

So, if I wrote about something like this, does this mean that I believe in cryptids?

The answer to that is that I believe in possibility, above all else. I believe that just because I (or anyone else) has yet to experience something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Innumerable sightings of cryptids have been documented over the course of human history, and while we have yet to have definitive proof for all of these strange encounters, we have yet to explain them all away, either.

Who says that cryptids aren’t real? The concept I wrote about, where cryptids are hiding among us and disguised as ordinary people, is far from new. Most legends we know about the most popular of monsters (like vampires and werewolves) depict them as normal-looking humans for most of their lives, so why can’t the same be true for all cryptids?

What’s to say that the Loch Ness Monster doesn’t have a normal 9-5 job when they aren’t swimming around in the depths? Or maybe the Moth-man is the guy baking those amazing cookies that the rest of the PTA loves during the day, and then goes onto spend his nights gliding along the darkened roads of Appalachia. Why not, right?

There are still so many great mysteries about our world, even in an age of such technological advancements. We’ve only explored maybe 5-10% of our oceans, and science is still discovering thousands of new species every year. So yeah, there’s still a lot of mystery to be discovered out there, so why be close-minded about it?

I’m not here to say that what I’m writing is fact by any means. A Monster Named Jane is a work of pure fiction. Even so, the concept of how the Smith family and its kind live is not beyond the realm of possibility, and that’s what makes it so cool. Yeah, it sounds far-fetched, but look at the phases of monsters that have already existed on this planet. Things like Sabretooth tigers, Tyrannosaurs, and Megalodons were all once very alive and real, so maybe they still are (in a sense). Maybe, they’ve just gotten better at hiding themselves, and we’re all happily oblivious to it. It’s a stretch, but it’s also something we have yet to disprove, so we may as well enjoy ourselves with entertaining the notion from time to time. That’s how I think about it, anyways…

I WANT TO HEAR WHAT YOU THINK!

We’ve all heard of the big-time cryptids, like Sasquatch and Chupacabras, but what about the local legends? Here in Ohio, we have stories of Frog Men, South Bay Bessie, and Orange Eyes, just to name a few. I love learning and talking about cryptids, so if you have a particular story you would like to share, feel free to do so in the comment section below! And who knows? Maybe your story will find its way into one of my next projects, or perhaps become the inspiration for another writer that shares a passion for cryptids. So yeah, feel free to chime in!