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. 

On the Strength of My Disdain

I recently finished--well, "finished" as in good enough to show people publicly--another short story set in Krevborna. This one is about Viktoria Frankenstein, heir to the infamous family's legacy of monstrosity, and the lengths she's willing to go to get her doctorate.

I've been told that there are several "killer lines" in this by my advance readers, so if you like the kind of vicious patter and megalomaniacal declarations that you can see at the right, you might just enjoy the whole thing.

You can read "On the Strength of My Disdain" here.

The Tinkling of Cracked Bells

"The Notifications Widget will disappear on 7 March, 2019."

The words crackled through the speaker of an old transistor radio. The man who said them sounded old and of a different era. His wavering voice should have been reporting that Pearl Harbor had been attacked, that the Hindenberg had gone down, that we should all buy war bonds for God and America. If sound could be sepia-toned, his inflection was surely mottled and brown.

I couldn't have heard it right. I picked up the radio, testing its weight, feeling its warmth. I gave it a slight shake. Not hard enough to break anything, but hard enough to know that the radio was really there, in my hand, a thing that exists.

And then I noticed...the radio wasn't even plugged in. The cable dangled from the back like a useless vestigial limb.

"The Notifications Widget will disappear on 7 March, 2019," the voice intoned again, more urgently, somehow closer and more intimate.

Somewhere a cracked bell smiled and rang one final time.