October Backlist Bonanza: 'Arabesque' and 'Henning'

And we begin the final quarter of the year, which also happens to be my favorite (the first quarter comes second, obvs) with the nights lengthening and the temperatures dropping. For this month, we've got two more books on the half-off throne:

ARABESQUE

An ambitious young princess, Ulrike, turns to the dark arts in order to become queen despite her younger sister's warnings of a fatal consequence to mortgaging her soul. She succeeds, yet Ulrike finds herself trapped in a hateful marriage, her mind slowly being devoured by her powers, while conceiving and giving birth to a boy.

Alarick -- "the bastard prince" -- becomes the court's favorite object of mockery because of the scandal of his conception, his mother's spiraling madness compounding his ordeal. When Alarick falls in love with a childhood friend, Roald von Thiessen, the added sin of an unnatural romance gets caught up in a tumultuous aristocratic environment that's rife with hypocrisy, cruelty, betrayal, and murder.

Forcibly separated from each other during a bloody uprising, Roald and Alarick become helplessly ensnared in nightmarish adventures designed to twist their characters and destroy their minds in the process. The young lovers fight for their souls and a way back to each other in a world weighed down by the forces of dark and light magic, and gods grapple with each other over mortal destinies.

Arabesque is more than a gothic, homoerotic retelling of the Snow White folktale. It is also a dark allegory exploring contemporary issues such as misogyny, homophobia, and conversion therapy.

and

HENNING

Book 1: The Hunted Prince: Young Henning Babkis has learned not to consider himself to be anything special. Ignored and taken for granted by his family, his education suffering as a result of their neglect, he nevertheless struggles to fit in and improve himself, though with unimpressive results. He's also learned not to expect anything more for himself, convinced that he's doomed to live his life in a deep closet, surrounded by people who don't care and who'd have given him a lot of grief if they were to find out he's gay.

Things come to a sudden head when Henning's fifteenth birthday rolls around. An unexpected and terrifying attack by a creature from another world shakes up his quiet life, and Norbert steps forward with remarkable and shocking revelations as to Henning's true identity. And from a boy who's grown up to think himself as a nobody, Henning discovers a previous life in a world called Wintergrave -- a world of magic, romance, and danger.

In the company of a motley bunch of former warriors, Henning must reclaim his former life and regain his powers in order to defeat an old threat. But in order to do that, he needs to convince a certain former lieutenant that the two of them were deeply bonded before and need to reform their connection now in order to get their powers back. The wrinkle? Ellery Thomas is in a happy relationship with another boy in this lifetime.

Book 2: Prince of Wintergrave: Being a prince in a past life yields no benefits in the present, Henning has quickly learned. His concerned housemates have made themselves his official, overbearing chaperones, Ellery appears to despise him, and Henning's limited movements slowly wear down his nerves. With his awakening process turning out to be more of a zombie-like stagger, the stakes rise inevitably as undead attacks not only increase in frequency, but also in danger levels.

Henning finds some relief in the company of Alan Scott -- a handsome, smart young man he meets in a store, who displays an earnest interest in Henning. He gradually tears Henning's heartbroken attention away from Ellery, offering him promises of happiness as can only be defined in a boy's first love.

In the meantime, danger now spills over to threaten innocent civilians as they get dragged into monster attacks, making it difficult for Henning and his companions to fight back while raising troubling questions about the walls between worlds being torn down by dark magic. It also reveals the effect of a soul bond on Henning and Ellery's awakening -- that is, each boy's awakening is affected by the other, and the mystery of how and why only get muddier.

As Henning and his companions scramble for answers, it's a mad race against time when things happen that make them suspect Varian of crossing over to their world, searching for Henning.

Both books are 50% off in e-book format through this month, and I'll be posting tidbits about each in the coming days.  

Seeing the Backside of Summer and Welcoming Fall (At Last!)

Granted, the Fall / Autumn Equinox is tomorrow, but I won't have time at all to write a post. 

hand-drawn illustration from Freepik

I began preliminary work on Doppelgänger after hemming and hawing for so long on how best to approach the narrative. It's a return to dark drama, and considering the subject (hell, the title!), I need a very personal touch for the book, and since I've been champing at the bit for another epistolary narrative, I finally settled down on a series of short journal entries from the MC (at the moment named Alec, but that might change). 

Everything right now is a placeholder (character names included), and so far I've only written just over 600 words. 

I was at first planning to get going on this book in October, but as I've given myself all of September to finish polishing up The Twilight Lover and then be lazy for the rest of the month, I feel energized enough (not to mention inspired enough) to at least get the opening page written. I still have time to sit on this and see if I still like it when I look at it next weekend. 

But I love the idea of a character who already feels isolated pouring his thoughts into a banged-up, spiral-bound (generic) notebook for comfort -- hence a return to the epistolary form. The difference between this book and all the other books I've written in this format is that the account is strictly in journal entries and no letters (texts and emails included). 

As before, too, I'm going to have to be careful moving forward with this because dialogue in the traditional sense shouldn't be an extensive part of journal entries -- summaries of conversations and the character's responses to them, yes, but not detailed exchanges. 

The same goes with events that transpire, of course. I still look to books like Dracula as both inspiration on what to do and what NOT to do what with all those looooong, overly detailed recollections in journal entries. The Demeter captain's log entries are the way to go, but Alec's will be more extensive than those as well. And I daresay sinking myself into a new gothic horror book in epistolary form is the way to experience Autumn. 

Another thing I'd like to share is a possible plotbunny for another book set in the Nightshade universe, but it's just a teeny-weenie germ of an idea, and it might not happen at all. I'll play with it some more and see if it promises enough weight and heft for a complete story. If I do add it to my to-do list, there's going to be another shuffling of the calendar. But as always, I'll post about it, regardless.
 

'A Murder of Crows': Art as Vengeance

And here we have bratty novel number two. Luxembourg is an unusual country to choose as the setting for the novel because it's never on anyone's radar, mine included. For this final novel in the Arcana Europa collection, I wanted to use a country I haven't touched on before. Especially since I've written books set in largely four nations I'm far more familiar with time and time again: England, France, Germany, and Italy (primarily Venice). My first attempt at branching out was with The Amaranth Maze (Sweden), and then I decided to challenge myself with yet another location I knew nothing about.

It was a deep dive into Luxembourg's history, in that case, and I was pleasantly surprised to see patterns of migration into the country. 

In case you didn't know, Rembrandt van Rijn tops my list of favorite artists. And with the idea of regional magic being at the core of the Arcana Europa books, I decided to have Dutch magic be in paint. Mathieu's inscriptive magic is something more like minor magic, if you will, as it's a rare talent but very useful in education. As he's from France, which I've already covered in The Flowers of St. Aloysius, I decided not to rehash nature magic that was already explored in that book though it does enjoy a cameo in the end. 

And so this novel is peopled with immigrants who've all settled down nicely in Luxembourg.

a still from the BBC adaptation of Le Fanu's ghost story

Two other things greatly inspired this book's plot: Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's "Strange Event in the Life of Schalken the Painter" (one of my all-time favorite ghost stories) and Nemesis, the goddess of retribution and divine justice in Greek mythology. 

The former, of course, involves also one of my favorite horror tropes of the demon lover, but its presence in the book is a lot subtler than it was in The Amaranth Maze. However, the dark, brooding atmosphere of the story and the visuals I ran across online from the TV adaptation from 1979 worked perfectly for my inspiration. Rembrandt's portraits were also mined for mood and atmosphere.

"Justice and Divine Vengeance Pursuing Crime" by Pierre-Paul Prud'hon

Nemesis is something of a staple in my books, and in this case her presence is closely tied with what I call Dutch magic. Paint and art in this instance aren't only used to capture beauty and emotion, but also to exact vengeance depending on the artist's intent. It was an idea that first came to me when I wrote Ambrose, but it finds full expression in A Murder of Crows. 

A Murder of Crows is now 50% off in e-book format through the end of September. To get your copy, go here for a list of online bookstores.  

'The Amaranth Maze' and... Haunted Mazes, Yeah!

On to problem child number one. 😅 And here I am again with that chronic condition of mine called candor, especially when it comes to my own work. But I'm not going to groan like a parent looking back at those days when a growing child gave me so much sass. 

Okay, so I love mazes. I love labyrinths. There's a difference between the two, and while I dig the idea of labyrinths more as a story element in gothic fiction, I opted for a maze for this book because an escape is needed for the romantic relationship to work (vague, I know, but I'm trying to avoid spoilers here). 

When I read Stephen King's The Shining, I was immediately drawn to the animal topiary and maze where Danny played (that ghost-child in the tunnel made me nearly crap my pants, let me tell you). Since I was a teenager when I read the book, I didn't know till that moment that, Jesus, a maze could fuck you up. 

Fast forward to my post-college years, and I ran across ghost story anthologies of my present hero in classic ghost fiction, M.R. James -- specifically, "Mr. Humphreys and His Inheritance". After years of not even thinking about mazes and how they can, yes, fuck you up, reading that story lit the fires, and there we go again with the muses refusing to shut their yap. 

Guys, get a load of this incredible video adaptation of the story using silhouette animation a la Lotte Reiniger: 

To add something extra to poor Lauris's troubles, I again turned to one of my favorite horror tropes: the demon lover. And when fused (sort of) with a cursed maze, it all made a hell of a lot of sense, and I just HAD to run with it. 

And as for the book's title, not only does "Amaranth Maze" sound good (it does -- a bajillion percent), the plant itself holds significant meaning in folklore: immortality and endless love. In the book, the significance is ironic, again much to Lauris's dismay. The setting being in Sweden plus the book also being a part of the Arcana Europa collection, the use of Sweden's primary economy in the 19th century also ended up working really well for me as the country was progressing in finance at around that time while rural agriculture fell under its metaphorical wheels. So pitting Frederik the capitalist and Lauris the traditionalist against each other (at least at first) also turned into the right sort of conflict given their respective backgrounds.

The Amaranth Maze is currently 50% off in e-book format through September. You can get a copy from the online bookstores listed over here. And, as always, thank you for your support.

September Backlist Bonanza: 'The Amaranth Maze' and 'A Murder of Crows'

A new month, a new sale. Cool, cool. Now these two books, the last of the Arcana Europa collection, are special -- but not in the way you think. They were the twin runts of the litter, if you will, and they challenged (not fought, but just challenged) me at every turn. 

I suppose I should refer to them as the twin brats of the litter instead of the runts. That tracks. I do look back at these two with bemused fondness because my experience working on them still hangs in space above California, and it's become part of the state's climate now. 

That's a lot of candor for two books I'm supposed to be advertising for the month, but I'm nothing if not blunt in the best of times (my husband will say "That's because you're an INTJ, which makes you a borderline sociopath" -- but he's an ISFP, so what does he know? 😁 ). I'll touch on these books' creation when I post about each down the line, but yeah.

All writers have their problem children, and these two are mine -- at least in this particular collection. The good thing is that they're nowhere near as problematic as Eidolon (for which I'm still grieving, by the way). As I've said, they're just brats, and if they were human kids, they'd have spent a lot of time in the time out corner. Just saying.

Anyway...

THE AMARANTH MAZE

A legend of a long-dead murderer buried in a mysterious maze. A cruel, childish trick gone wrong. A dangerous vow made in trust by a shy and lonely young boy. And somewhere in the idyllic Swedish countryside, a centuries-old entity is summoned from its thorny grave.

Fourteen years later, twenty-two-year-old Fredrik Niequist returns from his travels, a brilliant financier who intends to break new ground in the Swedish agricultural industry by commercializing local nature magic. He is also newly engaged to a wealthy childhood friend in a cynical and loveless partnership.

Twenty-year-old Lauris Ahlberg, meanwhile, turns his mind to botany as a promising apprentice to an English botanic occultist. As he studies a flower species displaying marks of the night world, he realizes the tainted flowers' sudden appearance near his home and the ominous pattern they form signify a terrifying presence coming from a familiar source.

When Fredrik and Lauris cross paths again, old wounds break open, and promises of forever after ring hollow as the two awkwardly rekindle their friendship. And in the meantime, a creeping threat takes physical shape, breaking past its prison of thorns in order to lay claim to what has long belonged to it.

and then we have

A MURDER OF CROWS

Blessed with the unique talent of Inscriptive magic, twenty-year-old Mathieu Perrault leaves his old life in France and the orphanage that has been his home since his childhood for work as the new tutor to a five-year-old mute girl. His head filled with dreams and endless possibilities, Mathieu soon finds himself in a great house tucked away in the quiet wooded hills of the northern region of Luxembourg.

A house occupied by an ailing Dutch artist, one burdened with a terrible secret, and his charming family. A house shadowed by the sudden death of a well-loved servant. A servant, in fact, whose ghost stirs from its dusky world and seeks out Mathieu in terror. Through echoes of past events in unlit hallways, incoherent messages carved into walls, and the eerie vigilance of crows guarding the family, the ghost does what it can to warn Mathieu of a coming danger.

And in the midst of warmth, laughter, and family, of friendship and magic, of young love blooming against a backdrop of terrible heartache and tragedy, Mathieu searches for answers in a dreamer's bid to give the ghost the peace long denied it. All the while, a twisted shadow from the past creeps forward, inching closer and closer to him, a vicious hunger that leaves ruin and death in its wake.

In that isolated great house among the silent trees and the watchful crows, Mathieu will soon learn that the restoration of balance in a world gone awry doesn't always lie in the sphere of ordinary, mortal men. 

Both books are 50% off through the whole of September, and for a list of online stores where you can purchase copies of the e-books, just click the book titles above. Onward!