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//**The Nine Pound Hammer**// by John Claude Bemis
**About this author:** I’ve always been fascinated by trains. My grandfather hopped trains all over the country in his “hobo days” and filled my head with curious stories of America’s lost past. Those stories, I suppose, were the beginnings of my first novel, The Nine Pound Hammer.

I grew up in rural eastern North Carolina by a swampy creek on the Neuse River. Yes, I’ve been bitten by a water moccasin, but fortunately not by an alligator. When you live in a county with just one stoplight, you learn how to entertain yourself. As a kid, I read a lot, played in tobacco barns, swam in the river when the jellyfish weren’t too thick, and learned violin and guitar.

Eventually playing classical violin in youth orchestras and playing electric guitar in a bunch of terrible rock and punk bands led me to American roots music. I’m partial nowadays to vintage country or blues, Cajun or bluegrass, anything with a fiddle or a musical saw. Some friends and I formed a band Hooverville and put out a pair of CDs of original songs. They’re fun to listen to if you like that kind of music.

At UNC-Chapel Hill, I studied Art History and Elementary Education. I taught elementary school for twelve years, mostly 4th and 5th grades as well as being a Gifted Education resource teacher. I got a chance in the classroom to teach the books I loved so much as a kid and discovered a lot of incredible new children’s literature along the way. But something seemed to be missing from my class’s bookshelf: fantasy based on America’s folklore.

Through old-timey music, I became fascinated with the way America’s myths have been passed down through songs. Drawing on the legend of John Henry’s struggle against the steam drill, I thought about how Southern folklore could be turned into epic fantasy. This passion grew into my first novel, The Nine Pound Hammer, a story set in a mythical 19th-century America full of traveling hoodoo conjurers, cowboys, swamp mermaids, and steamboat pirates. The adventures continue in The Wolf Tree and The White City, the other books in the Clockwork Dark trilogy.

I live the small-town life in Hillsborough, North Carolina with my wife, Amy, and daughter, Rose. We spend a lot of time hiking on the trails around our house, going into town for chocolates and coffees, or encouraging our overweight cat Max to run around some.

@http://www.johnclaudebemis.com/
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//What if John Henry had a son?//

Twelve-year-old Ray is haunted by the strangest memories of his father, whom Ray swears could speak to animals. Now an orphan, Ray jumps from a train going through the American South and falls in with a medicine show train and its stable of sideshow performers. The performers turn out to be heroes, defenders of the wild, including the son of John Henry. They are hiding the last of the mythical Swamp Sirens from an ancient evil known as the Gog. Why the Gog wants the Siren, they can’t be sure, but they know it has something to do with rebuilding a monstrous machine that John Henry gave his life destroying years before, a machine that will allow the Gog to control the will of men and spread darkness throughout the world .