Author: Joel Blaine Kirkpatrick

Joel Blaine Kirkpatrick writes horror, fantasy, science fiction, and other speculative fiction. Caraliza is a 2010 novel rooted in an old portrait studio on New York City’s Lower East Side. A secret connected to photographer Menashe Reisman has endured for seventy-five years, and his great-granddaughter Shelly disturbs it when she prepares to renovate the building. The title also names a girl once imprisoned nearby in 1919, linking the studio’s haunted photographs to a hidden history across the street. The novel runs to 228 pages and develops its mystery through place, images, and family inheritance. Kirkpatrick has also read novel submissions and worked in acquisitions for JournalStone Publishing, giving him experience with speculative fiction as both writer and editor. Caraliza turns the renovation of a physical building into an excavation of memories its occupants tried to contain. Readers encounter a supernatural mystery in which a camera can preserve more than an appearance, while changes made in the present disturb consequences that have waited across generations.