Moonlight Becomes You (The Eidola Project Series Book 2)

A Monster in the Shadows. A Town on the Brink.

When the Eidola Project arrives in Petersburg, Virginia, the mission is clear: help a Black community gripped by terror and reeling from a string of brutal murders. But as whispers of a werewolf echo through the streets and the Ku Klux Klan rallies against their presence, the team finds itself under siege from all sides. With the supernatural threat closing in and internal tensions threatening to tear them apart, survival may depend on confronting not just the beast outside—but the darkness within.

Moonlight Becomes You is the second novel in Robert Herold’s award-winning Eidola Project series, delivering a haunting blend of gothic horror, historical tension, and atmospheric suspense.

Step deeper into the shadows—start reading Moonlight Becomes You today.

Excerpt from the book

Doctor Joseph Curtis felt the gun against his back as Tom Garraty pushed him through the gauntlet of colored folks standing outside Garraty’s mansion. Doc Curtis recognized everyone in the lantern light. He’d attended to all of them or their kin since arriving in Petersburg, Virginia, after the Civil War, twenty years ago. He spotted Fredrick, who had a hernia last spring. Ralston and Henrietta, whose baby he delivered just three weeks ago. Old Chester Cummings, whose boil he lanced. And many more.

Garraty received a chorus of sympathetic remarks as he shoved Doc Curtis through the crowd. No sympathy for him, he noticed, the guy with the gun to his back. Didn’t seem fair. Several women stood off to one side crying. Even the preacher, Reverend Green, expressed his sympathy, though Garraty would never set foot in Green’s church except to burn it down. All these people here to pay their respects. Bad news traveled fast.

An hour ago, the doctor and his wife, Dinah, had just put their two boys to bed. They sat on either side of a kerosene lamp, he with a copy of Harper’s Weekly and she darning socks. Someone began pounding on their door.

Dinah looked at him and shook her head, sensing danger. “Don’t open it,” she whispered.

Instead, he’d gone to the door, thinking it might be an emergency. Just as he reached out to push back the bolt, the door crashed into him and nearly knocked him off his feet. Garraty grabbed the doctor’s shirt front, steadying him, while at the same time thrusting a revolver into his belly.

“Get your bag,” the tall, muscular white man demanded. The doctor could smell the bourbon on his breath.

Garraty stood a good six inches taller than the doctor and had broad shoulders. His blond hair stood so close-cropped on his tanned head he appeared almost bald. He wore no jacket, only gray breeches and a white shirt, rumpled and stained with sweat. Disheveled or not, Garraty wasn’t just any white man, but the Grand Cyclops of the local Ku Klux Klan.

“No!” shouted Dinah, standing and spilling her straw basket of sewing materials from her lap. Spools of thread bounced on the floor, rolled across the pine floorboards, and banged to a stop against the wall.

Doc Curtis waved her off and shook his head. She should know better than to cross Garraty. He looked back at the man who still clutched him by the shirt front and was still pointing a gun. The doctor attempted a smile. “What’s this all about, Mr. Garraty?” His words sounded frightened, in spite of himself.

The Klansman looked surprised at the challenge. Instead of shooting him, Garraty took a deep breath and exhaled bourbon fumes. “My wife’s giving birth. Midwife says the baby’s breeched, and she can’t right it.”

“But why him?” asked Dinah, her distinctive almond eyes wide with fear. “Why do you want my husband?”

Instead of addressing her, Garraty stuck his face next to the doctor’s. “Tried every white doctor in Petersburg. They’re either out on calls or can’t be found. Now get your things!” Garraty threw him across the room. This time he did fall.