The Pain Eater by Courtney Diles and Its Paranormal Playlist
Hi there, I'm author Courtney Diles and in a certain way, I’m over The Pain Eater. No, I’m serious—it filled my life for a long time, and I was ready when it was time to move on and work on other projects. Not to mention, once a book is published, it’s almost like a loss because it no longer belongs to the author—it belongs to the readers. The readers’ interpretations of the words become what matter. I was ready for that to happen. But I’m not over my playlist for it. I miss it!
It contains 185 songs, so I won’t go through all of them, but here are the highlights:
It contains 185 songs, so I won’t go through all of them, but here are the highlights:
This music video contains a monster that looks a lot like a pain eater, and the dark tone suits the beginning of the book, which has a horror vibe.
Roxie has voices in her head. This song describes an attitude toward voices that I wanted to get Roxie to adopt by the end of the book. Whether I succeeded in that is debatable.
This clip helped me write certain scenes. Commenting further would be a spoiler.
The blurb makes it clear that this book involves campus violence, so that’s not too much of a spoiler.
A lot of these lyrics are relevant, but the words that pierced my heart while I was writing were “Don’t come searching when I go missing.” When I originally wrote The Pain Eater, the love interest left at the end. I also wrote the book unsure of what genre it would be. When I finished and began researching, I realized that for it to be considered urban fantasy, I’d have to add at least 20,000 words. If it were paranormal romance, all it would need would be a happier ending. So I made my choice, and I honestly like how it turned out.
I won’t reveal which elements of Beauty and the Beast I adapted to this story, but it definitely had an influence.
The first two lines say it all: “I’m friends with the monster that’s under my bed, get along with the voices inside of my head.”
“Shadows and monsters.” The pain eater starts out as a shadowy monster. “Who is in control?” Roxie or her voices? “Villains that live in my head.” One of her voices, Cruel, tries to make her kill herself. “I’ll never die when I’m dead.” Explaining why this one is relevant would be a spoiler.
This song does a good job of describing the pain eater’s feelings for Roxie…and her eventual feelings for him. I can’t say more without spoiling things… Gah!
This honestly is a song I listened to while writing the book, but I’m adding it to this list because I realized I’d filled it with sad/creepy songs. Sorry about that.
The Pain Eater
The Divine Benefactors
Book Four
Courtney Diles
The Divine Benefactors
Book Four
Courtney Diles
Genre: Paranormal romance
Publisher: The Wild Rose Press
Date of Publication: November 28, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5092-2270-4 Paperback
ISBN: 978-1-5092-2271-1 Digital
Number of pages: 238
Word Count: 55096
Cover Artist: Debbie Taylor
Tagline: A beast consumed with pain could be her greatest pleasure.
Book Description:
Roxie Maeda is a college senior who hears voices in her head. When she first sees the demonic creature haunting her crush, she blows it off as a hallucination, but then it shows up in her Psych class, visible to everyone.
Its appearance triggers a police search of the campus, which reveals a bag of guns right outside the classroom. Someone was planning to shoot up the school. Over time, the creature discloses that he is a pain eater—a cursed, undead human who eats pain demons that arise from injuries, taking the pain into himself.
His selflessness sways her, and she befriends him only to fall in love. Together, they resolve to break his curse and save Prometheus University from its unknown attacker.
Excerpt:
Without closing
my eyes, I slowly wrapped my mind around what the guy in black was. Monster.
Supernatural. Something that wasn’t supposed to exist. But what exactly was he?
Could he be a ghost? He could walk through walls. He could disappear.
What kind of
ghost dresses like some kind of assassin and gets his jollies from causing
campus lockdowns? It didn’t fit.
Plus, he was
flesh and bone when I hit him with the knife. I thought about banshees, but
banshees were female, weren’t they?
I thought about Japanese shinigami, escorts to
the underworld—but no one had died.
About the Author:
Courtney has an English degree with a Writing Concentration from the University of South Carolina. She lives in Indiana with her Marine husband, two singing huskies, and three purring kitties. She blogs about her own experiences with mental illness.
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Website: www.courtneydiles.com
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