Your heart races, your palms become slick with sweat, the skin covering your knuckles stretches and turns white as your fists clench, then … you turn the page. Those of us who disrespect our plans for tomorrow and stay up all night reading page after page of the most terrifying and thrilling fiction will be glad to hear that there is a writer in our own back yard who produces just such tantalizingly horrific works. Meet Edward Lorn; Daphne’s own horror/thriller writer. The impending release date for Lorn’s third, viciously delicious book, “Hope or the Wicked,” is rapidly approaching, and readers all over are biting their nails in anticipation.

“Hope for the Wicked” is about two nefarious characters who end up doing good deeds.

As Lorn says, “Larry and Mo Laughlin are retired killers turned private investigators with monetary woes. So when their handler introduces them to the Trudeaus, one final job is placed on the docket. Jacob and Bernice Trudeau need their teenage daughter, Amy, found, and they also want the men responsible dead. Two million dollars is an offer Larry and Mo can’t refuse. To find Amy, the Laughlins must travel to Mexico, where they are thrust into a world of debauchery so foul they will be forever changed.”

Daphne’s chill-inspiring author confesses that he has not always been a writer, but “I've always been a storyteller, of that much I'm sure.”

As a child, Lorn expressed his creativity through devious outlets.

“Growing up, I had a wayward imagination,” he says. “Simple elaborations grew to lies the size of skyscrapers until I was finally called on it. The event that turned me onto the career path I'd eventually take as an adult happened in first grade. My teacher allowed each member of her class five minutes for show-and-tell every Friday. I always chose tell, seeking a venue for my performances. One Friday, I told my class that my baby brother had died over the weekend. The children in attendance cried, as did my teacher.

This story being a complete lie—Lorn had no such brother and suffered no such loss—his mother punished him then took his teacher’s advice. Lorn says that once his teacher found out he had been lying, she was upset, but also “she was impressed by the details that my story contained. She offered my mother a piece of advice: Why not have me write all these ‘stories’ down?”

So, his mother went out and got him a Brother. Not a brother about whom to tell tall tales, but a Brother typewriter with which to write stories.

At the end of January, Lorn will celebrate his debut novel’s first birthday. He says his debut novel, “Bay’s End” “was my first completed novel that I felt had something to say worth sharing with the rest of the world. At its heart, the book is a coming of age tale.”

Since his debut a little over a year ago, Lorn has published a second novel, “Dastardly Bastard,” a short story collection, “What the Dark Brings,” and now audiences are itching for the release of Lorn’s third novel, “Hope for the Wicked.”

Lorn says he finds inspiration “in everyday life. Be it the news or simple things that happen around the house, I find inspiration in just about everything.”

In his newest book, Lorn says that the inspirational seed came from “a news report on the Mexican Cartel's activities on the California border. ‘Hope for the Wicked’ began branching off in all kinds of funky directions, and I ended up completely abandoning the Cartel storyline. But that's what inspiration is good for, getting the juices flowing, making the words spill forth. I leave the rest of the process up to the characters. They tell the story, so my job as transcriber is rather easy.”

Lorn asks in his new book, “Is there any hope for the wicked?” But the better question to ask might be: is there any hope that readers will be able to put the book down?

Warning his audience, Lorn says, “to new readers, let me say this: Be wary. I go places you may not be able to sto