Hellertown author Larry Deibert is fascinated by the supernatural.

"I guess horror, paranormal and time travel are my favorite things to do," Deibert said in a recent interview.

Like his three or four previous works, including the locally based "Christmas City Vampire," his new novel, "From Darkness to Light," revolves around supernatural events. He describes it as a "Christian paranormal" work.

That may seem to be a contradiction in terms, but it features an angel of God who is sent to a small group of humans to exhort them to send all earthbound ghosts to their final reward.

Deibert, who likes to use places he has visited as settings for his work, bases "From Darkness to Light" on the North Carolina coast, where he and his wife recently vacationed.

They stayed at the Carolina Temple Island Inn in Wrightsville Beach, and immediately fell in love with the century old building, with its wrap-around porches and wicker furniture.

Deibert says he told the owner of the inn he wanted to write a ghost story based there, and, perhaps serendipitously, the owner informed him the inn was haunted.

That was all Deibert needed to hear. He began researching the area, and decided the focus of his story would be the battleship North Carolina, which was involved in a World War II battle in the Pacific. The ship is now based in Wilmington, N.C., and is open to visitors.

Deibert went about creating a story about a sailor who disappears off the ship, and about his grandson, who starts looking into the disappearance decades later.

The sailor and several other people are enlisted by an angel to get rid of the ghosts on the ship. They go to a deserted barrier island to pursue this endeavor, and in the process, all of their lives are changed.

With its themes of time travel and the paranormal, "From Darkness to Light" is in the same genre as his last novel, "The Other Side of the Ridge - Gettysburg June 27th 2013 to July 2nd 1863," which, of course, is about the battle of Gettysburg and involves a black soldier who fought there.

Deibert self-published the latest novel after the publisher of "The Christmas City Vampire" went out of business. "When you're an unknown, why let a middle man in?" he explained.

He is already full of ideas about the next book…or two or three.

Some of the characters in "From Darkness to Light" will be around for another book, he predicts, although he won't say which ones. And he is now working on a novel called "Family" about a family of immortals.

"I started it before I wrote this one [Darkness]," he said, "but I couldn't figure out where to go with it."

After that, maybe he will return to Bethlehem, as a setting for a werewolf novel.

And he's also thinking of a book which will pay homage to the military police who helped save Saigon in 1968, thus returning to the topics of his earliest works, which take place during the Vietnam war.

Deibert served in Vietnam, and started writing after he began networking with other Vietnam veterans and hearing some of their stories.

He began to record some of his experiences as well as those of the other veterans, and that effort eventually led to his first novel, "95 Bravo," which he later rewrote as "Combat Boots, Dainty Feet."

Deibert, a retired mail carrier, now works part time as a courier for Lehigh Valley Hospital.

He still networks extensively with other local writers. There are more than 40 writers in the Lehigh Valley Writers Group, which he is part of, and at least half of them have had work published.

Unfortunately, he says, it's hard for them to become known. He said he would like to see someone open a store which would sell exclusively locally made goods, including books.

Meanwhile, he has already had one book signing of "From Darkness to Light" at the Moravian Bookstore, and said another one is planned, for March 29 from 1 to 3 p.m.

His newest book, as well as his previous books, are available on Amazon.com.

To obtain a signed copy, email him at larrydeibert@rcn.com.