Frogman

A Small Town Survival Horror

Cal Whitaker is going nowhere. A college dropout working a dead-end courier job, his life is a lonely cycle of late-night drives on the back roads of rural Ohio. That is, until he sees something impossible in his headlights—a slick, leathery creature with bulging black eyes that scrambles into the darkness.

His chilling encounter is dismissed by the local sheriff as a drunken mistake, leaving Cal isolated and questioning his own sanity. But when he finds claw marks on his car and a foul, swamp-like odor starts to linger around his home, he knows the thing from the river is real. And it knows where he lives.

Driven by a terrifying certainty, Cal digs into local history and uncovers a dark legend the town has tried to forget. He's not just dealing with a solitary monster, but a subterranean colony that has been hidden beneath the town for generations. When a child from the neighboring trailer is taken, Cal's search for answers becomes a desperate rescue mission. Armed with little more than a map of the town's storm drains and his own crumbling courage, he must descend into the suffocating darkness to confront the things that live below—or be dragged down into their world forever.

The REAL story about the Loveland Frog Man (?)

Ethan Blackwood takes another cryptid fresh from popular “monster pod-casts” and spins out an adventurous horror story from its meager fragments of news clips, campsite tales, and urban legends. Mr. Blackwood has written a library full of “Big Foot” books, so I was excited to get his take on one of the more obscure American folk monsters: the “Loveland Frog Man”. Ethan Blackwood usually writes a butt-kicking great thriller, and he once again delivers… although this one got a bit repetitive. The hero just doubts himself so many times I felt like saying “Quit all the internal dialogue and just F-ing DO IT!” Plus there are a few characters who minds are stuck in denial no matter what the hero does… to the point of being ridiculous. When I learned “story telling” I was taught you write in ideas like you are playing cards. You draw one card out and lay it down. You can play out the card that explains the “hero struggles with a low opinion of himself.” But then… that’s it. DONE. You cannot play that same card again. Your audience knows about the hero’s struggle now. They won’t forget. So, if you go through multiple scenes where the hero has multiple struggles with his low self esteem again, and again, and again - you are being repetitive and boring your audience. This gets especially annoying when, at the climatic action-ending, the author brings up that same old card again and stalls up the action and cools down the suspense and mucks-up the enjoyment of the reader. Other than that, I liked “Frog Man”. Thanks Ethan Blackwood.