Joe DeRouen

I will be totally revamping this website soon. Stay tuned!

Just nine days until Leap Year, my newest novel, is released! If you want to pre-order the Kindle version, check out the link below. $3.99! If you want an autographed trade paperback, send me a message. It’s $15.99 + exact shipping costs!

March’s Patreon Challenge story is here! If you subscribe to my Patreon, you can read it for free. Here’s a teaser:

Happy Together, an old song by The Turtles, played on the Amazon Echo while John used a hacksaw to disassemble Miranda’s body. It was ironic, he thought, because they had indeed been very happy together, for many long years, but that had all changed less than 24 hours ago.

Finally, he sawed through the ankle bone. That was a tough one. John tossed the foot into the Hefty black trash bag he had purposed for the task at hand, and then began working on the other foot. 

“Alexa, next,” he said, and the 1960s playlist skipped ahead to the next song, Yesterday by The Beatles.

Yesterday, all their troubles seemed so far away…

For more, visit: https://www.patreon.com/posts/happy-together-25402477

I released the third of my Patreon Challenge stories a few days ago, Online Undead. You can check it out here if you’re my patron:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/online-undead-23976252

And here’s a teaser:

My name is Charlie (no relation to Leroy) Jenkins, and I think I’m being haunted. But of course, I’m getting ahead of myself, and it’s not so much haunted as…well, I suppose I should start at the beginning.

Nathan and I had been best friends since the 2nd grade, when his family moved here from Dallas eight years ago. His parents hadn’t allowed him to socialize outside of school at first, but we’d found other ways to connect. We’d done everything together online we could, really, but mostly what we’d done is play video games. We’d spent so much time paired up in the digital world, it was almost impossible to believe that I’d never see him again not only physically but also digitally.

Around 5th grade Nathan’s parents loosened up a bit and we’d begun hanging out more in person, but the pattern had already been set. The digital world was our domain, and we spent most of our time together there, battling dragons of all different shapes, sorts, and sizes. 

We started with Disney’s Toontown Online, quickly progressed to Pirates of the Caribbean and then to City of Heroes, and when NCSoft stupidly shut down CoH, moved on to Secret World: Legends and World of Warcraft. Lately, however, we’d been going the nostalgia route, playing Toontown Rewritten (a fan-made server created after Disney shut down the original) while our phones were almost completely dedicated to Pokémon Go.

https://www.patreon.com/posts/online-undead-23976252