Charles's Site

THE-ALTERNATE-WORLD-OF-CJG. Consider yourselves welcome. ___________________________________ Deadly Journeys : five dark, paranormal horror tales, three time-travel journeys, and the calling card of aliens called crop circles -- this is not the web site for wimps. By the way, it also includes some mainstream novels that are semi-exposes. Brace yourself and keep that e-book reader handy !

Dr. Harper Paget, mythologist, descended from an ancestor who was falsely accused of being a witch and burned at the stake, continues the struggle of his ancestors against the dimension traveling, shape-shifting entities who can take on the images of creatures in our world (lamiae in ancient Greece and kuntilanak in modern Indonesia). More insidious than ghosts, they can haunt apartment buildings, campus hotels, movie theatre buildings, and even the clinic where Harper is having stitches put onto his face. The characters we see here, exploring a dark and mysterious place, discover that not everyone is who they appear to be. Friends and loved ones can be taken over or killed and nowhere are they safe. That is the premise for the paranormal realm as explored in the novels I have posted on Amazon-Kindle as e-books, what my brother Sam has titled the DARK JOURNEYS SERIES. The first novel, which takes place in Atlanta, is DARK NEIGHBORHOODS, is where these shape-shifting creatures have arrived to stop Harper with his research about them and to take over a world that humans have not taken care of. The second novel moves to China where Harper, teaching at a Chinese university linked to his own university in McAbee, Illinois, finds himself facing doppelgangers of people that he knows -- including another Chinese teacher who becomes his love interest. Harper not only requires face surgery after one attack in a crowded dining hall but becomes crippled by another attack which requires his using a cane for the rest of the trilogy. When he moves to another university in NE China, he moves into a campus hotel that turns out to be haunted by these seemingly indestructible, shape-shifting creatures. This hotel definitely has DARK CORRIDORS. The third novel, DARK JOURNEYS, begins in China but moves back to the US, to a small town on the banks of the Mississippi River where Harper spent his days as a child. Here in Warrick, he is joined center stage by other characters, each with their own complicated personal issues, to fight the entities that threaten to take over the town. He learns of a vortex created by these dimensional-traveling entities which transports his Chinese lady friend to a closed movie theatre in Warrick owned by his friend Corey Braedon. She, however, arrives in the town in the past when Harper is a high school student. Switching places with her is a local young lady who is sucked through the same vortex from Warrick back to China. So . . . the situation is becoming intense and almost incomprehensible for Harper and his friends. As it is, Harper is not finished once he is back in China. He returns in the fourth novel, DARK TWILIGHT, where he and his Canadian friend (who discovers an earthly creature in the Philippines) brace themselves for more attacks and further deaths. Anyone could be a deadly kuntilanak, one of the girls in the student dorm across from his building, his girl friend who is from Indonesia, or Chinese ladies from his past. DARK TWILIGHT is now available. https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/912814 Book ID: 398518 https://www.books2read.com/u/bzPExz or https://www.books2read.com/u/bMQLJX I first used the term "horror" to describe the DARK JOURNEYS SERIES, but I learned that, even though a large fan base reportedly exists for horror, others are turned off by -- or frightened of -- the genre, maybe because of gory films showing up at the cinema these days. In China, many of my students confused the word "horror" with "horrible," and often wrote the latter when they meant the former. When I thought about it, I realized that horror was really a limiting term for the three works. So I now prefer "paranormal." We'll see what happens. The DARK JOURNEYS SERIES was given that name by my brother Sam, who is also responsible for book covers two and three -- the sepia-tone images and the lettering. I took the photo for the first book cover and the lettering was done by Aaron Gardner and the late Don Blair. The photo and design for the novels OF TIME AND THE DREAMER, FROM HERE TO ATLANTIS, CIRCLES AND REALMS, and ISLANDS IN TIME are my own. This is likewise true for the non-horror/non-sci-fi novels FORBIDDEN VOICES, FOREIGNERS AND EMPERORS, and SMS: THE SCAMMERS. . .

Let's Go
The reviews start here . . . Some journeys you don't want to take.

Review of Charles Justus Garard's "The Dark Journeys Trilogy" by Andrea Baskin, author of DARKNESS AND REVENGE: THE PUPPETMASTER'S GAME. Are you brave enough to follow Dr. Harper Paget around the world? You have already followed numerous characters on their journeys? What is the difference here? I will tell you. This time, you can’t trust your eyes or your feeling. You don’t know where you are going, and from where you started. On a journey to find out the truth about legendary creatures from other dimensions and times, Harper gets to fight not only them, but himself too. Facing the past to understand the present. Losing friends and lovers. Investigating and trying to understand, to find the answer to the main question: “Why him?” If you hide in the darkness long enough, it will get inside you. A simple, childish play can start an endless circle of things you can’t imagine. Chaos seems everywhere. The trilogy completes the picture, setting the pieces together like a puzzle. Breathtaking and intriguing, it doesn’t leave you time to recover from the unbelievable twists through the whole story. Enjoy the darkness, and don’t let the lady in the white gown get you!!! ANDREA BASKIN available on https://www.draft2digital.com/book/92570 www.smashwords.com/profile/view/chukkgarard www.amazon.com/Charles-Justus-Garard/e/B00B6S8TUS/ Get ready for horror, suspense, and even a psychological mystery. In the trilogy, we have creatures from another dimension who are almost impossible to destroy because they have been hidden on our planet for eons.
Dream worlds, the lost continent, and lovely ladies.

The fourth novel is about another type of journey. . . one that takes you to someplace very familiar and yet . . . very far away. It is a time-travel novel which sends our hero, Tyler Grant, reeling back to his past fourteen years ago. This is OF TIME AND THE DREAMER, a novel told from a male and a female third-person point of view (except for some notes and memoirs made by Estra Gudrun). With the help of a dream researcher and experimenter, Tyler volunteers to be sent through his own dream corridor to his own past. The first two journeys are successful, but the third is brought about by a car collision where someone apparently tries to kill him. His body is in a coma in an Atlanta hospital and his mind is floating free, connecting finally with his life as a graduate student at a southern Illinois university. The interesting thing is . . . he knows what is going to happen. . . he knows what everyone is going to say. What he does not realize is that he will soon not be alone in his own past. Others will join him from his own world in the present. Be prepared for the journey of your life. This novel unfolds inside your eyelids . . . in your psyche. We all have pasts . . . some less pleasant that others. Would you want to be trapped in your past and forced to re-live it . . . in a parallel dimension? The fifth journey is a different kind of adventure -- the discovery of an ancient village inside the earth that may be a remnant of the original destroyed civilization of Atlantis. What begins as a search for a missing British explorer turns out not only to be a violent struggle between members of two search parties but mainly the discovery of an extraterrestrial device that can act as a time machine. Sloan Abbott connects with this device and travels back to the original Atlantis, only to realize that he and others in the search party have connections there. He sees the actual lost civilization and as well as ancient versions of two of his colleague who are occupying ancient versions of themselves. In fact, he also has an antediluvian counterpart whose body he is inhabiting. The question is . . . can any of them survive the impending destruction of Atlantis? This e-book novel is titled FROM HERE TO ATLANTIS. In SHADOWS AND REALMS Cale Allison jumps two years at first with his young girlfriend Dina; he and Dina then become separated in a world that has been flooded and nearly destroyed until he and a friend, Warren, rescue her from scavengers and rapists. They are taken by Dr. Gillian Nash (who is rescued along with Dina) to a mysterious island where an elite populace considers itself to be superior to humans from the mainland. Gabriella, a woman he has known throughout much of his life, might or might not have joined the authoritarians led by Dr. Brannon. Cale meets Kassy, a member of the elite with whom he had been communicating when Kassy was then living two years in the future. Dina's father, on the other hand, is now part of the island authoritarian elite. However, it becomes apparent that it is the Custodians who are actually controlling humans, and Gabriella is descended from one of them. In this story, you will learn never to look at text messages in the same way, particularly if you discover than they come from the future. . All of the photos below were taken in China and in the Philippines. The first photo was taken in Anshan, the second in Liaocheng City. The photo of Holden, my ginger tabby cat, was also taken in Anshan. Actually, a cat does appear as a character in the third novel in the trilogy, DARK JOURNEYS. The three lovely ladies have counterparts in CIRCLES AND REALMS, ISLANDS IN TIME, and THE DARK JOURNEYS SERIES which now includes a fourth novel entitled DARK TWILIGHT. One of the ladies also had a counterpart in the forthcoming novel SHADOWS AND REALMS.
Welcome to my web page. The first three novels posted on Amazon-Kindle are PARANORMAL tales -- known as the DARK JOURNEYS SERIES. Added to this is now a fourth horror novel dealing with the same deadly creatures entitled DARK TWILIGHT. Some readers may call them horror e-book novels. Remember that there are some journeys that you don't want to take ... alone. ~~~ A fifth DARK JOURNEYS e-book novel finds Harper Paget a patient in a mental health institution because of experiences with creatures in Asia. His brother Sean tries to come to his aid while taking take of his financial problems. Also joining them is a cousin named Brandon Webster. But are any of them safe here in America from what might be the Lamia or Aswang, a vampire creature from the Philippines? Whichever it is, they have to keep in mind THE CURSE OF THE LAMIA. ~~~~ A completely different kind of journey is one involving a trip through Tyler Grant's dream corridor in a journey to his own past. This journey involves time travel to a replica of his past in a parallel dimension, and it is called OF TIME AND THE DREAMER. Tyler returns in ISLANDS IN TIME. At first, he time-jumps to an island he does not recognize. But where exactly is this island? And, for that matter, when? What do you do, Tyler, when you again discover that you are not in your own dimension? ~~~ FROM HERE TO ATLANTIS is another type of time travel that involves an extraterrestrial time probe inadvertently discovered inside the earth in what appears to be remnants of the lost civilization of Atlantis. This novel involves an adventure that takes us around, through, and under many twists and turns before the explorers even realize that close contact with the probe can take three of them back to the actual original Atlantis. The question is . . . is any escape possible before the antediluvian empire is destroyed?

If you do not have a Kindle in order to download e-books, you can still read them in your own browsers by installing the free Kindle Cloud Reader (see http://amzn.to/ltmrpK8). OF TIME AND THE DREAMER, the time-travel mystery, has been published by Smashwords as well as Kindle. Soon this different type of journey will be available in many different venues as submitted by Smashwords. I have not yet decided on the venues for FROM HERE TO ATLANTIS. It may include those I have used before . . . and may even include others.
A scene from The Alex Barteau Trilogy -- FORBIDDEN VOICES.

What would YOU do if you were a foreigner teaching in China? ______________________________________________ “Don’t do it, Alex,” Tony shouted. “No,” Hans agreed. “They will be embarrassed,” he added in his jaw-twisting German accent. “Embarrassed?” Alex echoed. It was Thanksgiving, and the International Affairs Office was hosting a dinner for the foreign teachers and some of the Chinese teachers. They occupied two large circular tables in adjoining dining rooms upstairs of the hotel restaurant across from the main campus, the restaurant where Alex and Jerry ate on the first day he arrived in the city. Joining them were the three Fu Wu Yuan ladies who worked for IAO. Again, members of the hotel staff served as waitresses in their green and gray short skirt uniforms and Big Chief Dr. Zhu drafted Little Chief Jeremy to pour the water, wine, and Snow beer. To their table, they brought turkey that had been sliced in large flat pieces with a turkey head propped up in the center of the serving plate. Okay. Fine. Let them be embarrassed.” The room seemed to grow warmer. The colors in the wall, the varnish of the woodwork, and the clothing of those seated around him seemed to increase in brightness and richness, like the colors on a television screen that seemed to overflow the boundaries of the characters and objects when someone turned up the contrast. The faces of the other diners at the table became as blurred as their over-lapping voices, and the sounds and images seemed to swarm together like a flowing combination of melted butter and syrup. “Don’t do it,” Tony again demanded. Tony used the assertive tone that he often used in bars when he began comparing universities in America with universities in Canada. Since he was a Canadian, it was natural that he regard American universities unfavorably during a comparison, but when his diatribes became more and more often launched from the bottom of his cups, only to be joined by Jody with her comparing an American education with a supposedly superior one from Britain, Alex decided to stop joining them for dinner – dinners that usually devolved into later visits to a bar where Marie’s drinking led to her sitting at the table in a sullen stupor and Tony’s drinking led to his being increasingly generous with his fatuous and unsubstantiated rhetoric. “You can’t point out their flaws and errors in this country, Alex,” Hans continued. “They don’t want their positions to be made more difficult by complaints from below. They only want to hear compliments from below. That’s why they hold dinners for the Chinese teachers and demand that they attend. They want to be given face.” Hans and Tony were so emphatic that Alex felt cowed. He didn’t know what to do with his indignation. Had he already started drinking Snow beer from the green bottles, he might have been relaxed enough or confident enough to shift into response mode, not that being more forthright with his colleagues would have guaranteed any recovery of face on his part. _ www.smashwords.com/profile/view/chukkgarard www.alternate-world-of-cjg.com
The Interview

DARK NEIGHBORHOODS Alex Jacobs interviews Dr. Harper Paget Alex: "By the way, Harper, I understand that you lost some loved ones before you ever came to Atlanta." Harper: "Yes. I lost my wife out in San Diego, California, and, later, an Indonesian lady friend in China. Both were killed by these entities to get at me." Alex: "Where did this all start?" Harper: "Centuries ago. Since ancient Greece with the lamiae and the kuntilanak in Indonesia. They came to Atlanta, to the DARK NEIGHBORHOODS, because we may have brought them here." Alex: "Where did it start for you?" Harper: "In a little farmhouse back in Illinois. Some of my friends think we brought them to this dimension through the Ouija board. I think they have been wanting to come to this time and place because they have been enemies of my ancestors for centuries. They know about my publications that try to warn the world about them." Alex: "And they want to stop you, of course." Harper: "Yes. And if they succeed, we will have many DARK NEIGHBORHOODS."

VIRGOSTONE
The means to reach us

"Us" means ghost-hunters or collectors of the paranormal: actual non-explainable experiences (encounters with ghosts, etc.), reviews of paranormal or UFO books, reviews of horror and ghost films (including my list of favorite ghost movies of all time), and letters or comments. My paranormal blog site is http://www.virgostone.me. Also check out THE HORROR EXPERIENCE hosted by my friend Bryan Hansen, HORROR HELLFIRE CLUB, FANS OF ALL THINGS HORROR, BRITISH HORROR WRITERS, ALONE WITH THE HORRORS: HORROR FICTION, KINDLE HORROR, HORROR BOOKS AND BRAINS, etc. affiliated with Facebook. Some of these horror sites can become a little profane, so be warned. You will also find some excellent science-fiction sites, most of which I use for my time-travel e-books. There are also sites for writers in general, such as KINDLE PUBLISHERS, NOOK AND KINDLE READERS, AUTHORS PROMOTING AUTHORS, BOOK WORLD, CELEBRATING AUTHORS, ALL THINGS BOOKS, AUTHORS AND READERS SHARING POOL (which has an excellent policy for promoting your books), PROMOTE YOURSELF, PROMOTE YOUR BOOKS, THE LITERACY LOUNGE: AUTHORS, WRITERS, PUBLISHERS, AND ILLUSTRATORS.etc. Join one of more of the sites and have fun chatting with others who share your interests. New sites seem to crop up everyday. The horror groups are good places to join discussions about horror books and films. Recently there was, for example, a lengthy discussion thread about THE EVIL DEAD and Stanley Kubrick's THE SHINING. Come and join in -- share your opinions. Even though I don't consider myself to be strictly a horror writer (more of a writer of the macabre, as Harlan Ellison, philosopher and author, states regarding his own work), it is a good place to start. I try to focus more on suspense with a few scares instead of splatter-gore and an abundance of four-letter words. I rely on psychological terror, even though the insidious entities from another dimension can be pretty nasty (see photos below).
Many dark journeys:

Dark Neighborhoods Dark Corridors Dark Journeys Dark Twilight The Curse of the Lamia plus the time-travel novel Of Time and the Dreamer a new type of dark journey -- into your past Plus a trip through time and space to the lost continent of Atlantis, right before it is to be destroyed - From Here to Atlantis And then - a different kind of invasion from the stars -- through crop circles in Circles and Realms Shadows and Realms proves that the aliens, or the Custodians, are not only still here but very much in control of a future island society where Cale and his young Asian lady friend Dina are taken to escape a great flood that had inundated much of the continents of the world, particularly America and Canada.

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The means to reach me:

I am now on all sorts of sites -- as advised by other writers who self-publish. Find me on Goodreads (where I review other books), Facebook (where I review other books as well as post photos -- including the cats I had while in China), LinkedIn, Pinterest, Tumblr, Google Plus, and a site for writers (www.writers-editors. com). If you are a serious writer of articles and looking for markets, join this organization and meet the helpful Dana Castell. You can also find her on LinkedIn. Yes, you can also be a writer of fiction, which is what I am these days. Free Kindle Cloud Reader (if you don't yet have a Kindle): http://amzn.to/ltmrpK8 Check me out . . . www.paranormal-and-ets.com www.smashwords.com/interview/chukkgarard www.smashwords.com/profile/view/chukkgarard http://www.amazon.com/Charles-Justus-Garard/e/B00B6S8TUS Recently I joined a new publishing group called Draft2Digital https://www.draft2digital.com/book/116371 OF TIME AND THE DREAMER https://www.draft2digital.com/book/92570 DARK NEIGHBORHOODS https://www.draft2digital.com/book/93599 DARK CORRIDORS https://www.draft2digital.com/book/115075 DARK JOURNEYS https://www.draft2digital.com/book/92258 FROM HERE TO ATLANTIS Pages for the new time-travel adventure novel From Here to Atlantis: www.amazon.com/dp/B00W0SWCLU www.smashwords.com/books/view/535284 Watch here for further information in the future. Thank you for visiting my web site. I really appreciate your time and consideration. Also . . . please see my blog at http://www.virgostone.me Have fun there with reviews and outrageous ads for my ebook novels. If you have psychic or ghostly experiences to share, feel free to do so there.

The reviews start here . . . Some journeys you don't want to take.

Dream worlds, the lost continent, and lovely ladies.

A scene from The Alex Barteau Trilogy -- FORBIDDEN VOICES.

The Interview

The means to reach us

Many dark journeys:

The means to reach me: