Ornamental Women is Now Available!

After a long, long road to get to this point, I can now say that Ornamental Women, my first novel, is available now at Amazon as a trade paperback and ebook!

Set in my long-running Krevborna setting, my novel is definitely in the dark fantasy/Gothic fantasy style, but with a few surprises. In lieu of writing the tradition back cover copy, this is how I describe the novel:

Death and Art
A grave robber and her automaton companion search for an absent corpse and a missing book of poems…

Heaven and Hell
A devil-worshipping bard plots the murder of an angel...

Love and Blood
A monster hunter and his witchy lover seek to thwart the rise of a pagan death goddess… 

 

Now, as a first-time novelist, you might have some reservations about giving me, a relative unknown, your time and money. Well, why not try before you buy? At this link you can read the first three chapters of the novel in full. 

If you're a reader looking for books informed by an author's idiosyncratic interests and obsessions, I think you'll find Ornamental Women to be chock full of my particularities rather than doing the paint by numbers trope checklist thing. While I won't say that my novel is a an entirely new kind of storytelling or anything like that, I don't know of any dark fantasy novels that have: 

• A plot inspired by the history of Pre-Raphaelite art
• A first date in an absinthe bar 
• Bards powered by the Gothic fantasy equivalent of black metal
• A grave robbing heroine who suffers from depression 
• A nunsploitation-inspired chapter set in a brothel 
• An automation discovering the joys of a little free library
• Freaks with mensur fighting scars, a different freak with a monstrous six-fingered hand, and yet another set of freaks with a fetish for redheads.

In short, my ideal reader is a sicko who loves dark fantasy, the Gothic, and Victoriana.

Also, it's important to me that you know this: no AI technology was used in the creation of this book. I wrote it using ideas from my human brain and typed it up with my human hands. You deserve better than AI slop. 

I sincerely hope some of you pick up my novel and give it a read. I'm totally biased, but I think it's actually a really fun read with action, horror, magic, mystery, and a dash of romance.