Beauty and the Beast retold in Christine Pope's Wolf of Harrow Hall

"Beauty and the Beast" is one of the most beloved fairy tales ever told. Right now there are two different film versions being developed. Christophe Gans' gorgeous French language version is available on YouTube. And if you go on GoodReads looking for a retelling of the tale, you're directed to a list with 1006 results, one of them my own novelette The Summer Garden. (There are 2611 retellings of "Cinderella" so that's even more popular as source material.)

Christine Pope likes "Beauty and the Beast." She retold it in her novella Breath of Life, which kickstarted her Gaia Consortium Series. And now she's used the story as a basis for a lush, snow-bound love story called The Wolf of Harrow Hall. Part of her Tales of the Latter Kingdoms series--all stand-alone fairy tales--Wolf has a gorgeous cover by Ravven, and an original new mythos that explains the nature of the beast. Buy it now at Amazon and on other publishing platforms.

Christine Pope: The Kattomic Energy Interview

 A native of Southern California, Christine Pope has been writing stories ever since she commandeered her family's Smith-Corona typewriter back in the sixth grade. Her short fiction has appeared in Astonishing Adventures, Luna Station Quarterly, and the journal of dark fiction, Dark Valentine. Two of her short stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

Christine Pope writes as the mood takes her, and her work encompasses paranormal romance, fantasy, science fiction, and historical romance. She blames this on being easily distracted by bright, shiny objects, which could also account for the size of her shoe collection. After spending many years in the magazine publishing industry, she now works as a freelance editor and graphic designer in addition to writing fiction. She fell in love with Sedona, Arizona, while researching the Sedona Trilogy and now makes her home there, surrounded by the red rocks. No alien sightings, though...not yet, anyway!

KT: Your new book, Angel Fire, rounds out the paranormal/sci-fi romance series you dubbed “The Sedona Trilogy.” Is that the last we’ll see of those characters?

CP: I hope not. I do have another trilogy partway sketched out in my head, but I’m sort of waiting to see how the original trilogy does now that it’s complete before I start into anything new.

              

KT:  Did you know when you wrote the first book in the series (Bad Vibrations) that the story would evolve into a trilogy?

CP: Actually, I didn’t. The original idea had been kicking around in my head for a while, and then it was on a later read-through while I was reformatting the book for print that I realized there was this overarching story going on behind Persephone’s and Paul’s romance that needed to be told. That’s when I decided to expand the book into a trilogy.

KT: Your love for Sedona really comes through in the books and I love that you set so many scenes in real places. When did you first visit Sedona? Did you fall in love with it the moment you set eyes on the red rocks?

CP: Our first visit was at the end of March in 2011. While I was doing research for Bad Vibrations, I came across a lot of references to Sedona in terms of UFO activity and alien abductions, including the theory that there’s actually an alien base built underground somewhere in Boynton Canyon. I’d already heard that the area was beautiful and a New Age center, so we decided to take a road trip and do some research in person.

In a way, my experience kind of mirrors that of Persephone in Bad Vibrations, since we wound our way down through the canyon on 89A and it was dark when we came into town. So it was really the next morning that I got my first glimpse of the red rocks – and yes, it was love at first sight. I can’t even really explain it, because I’m not that much of a “desert” person, but this doesn’t feel like a desert to me because there’s so much that stays green here year-‘round. In fact, it’s very green right now because of the monsoon rains we get in northern Arizona at this time of year.

KT: What’s next for you this year?

CP: Well, the next book out will be another novel in the Gaian Consortium series, The Gaia Gambit. It’s finished and with beta readers as we speak, so I’m hoping it will be out in at least ebook format by the end of August. Toward the end of September I’ll be re-releasing the second of my books that were published by a small press and to which I’m gradually getting back the rights. That one, Playing With Fire, is a paranormal romance novella.  In October I’m planning to put out an omnibus version of the Sedona Trilogy, and then either in later November or early December I’ll be releasing Ashes of Roses, a new novel in my Tales of the Latter Kingdoms series, this one based on the Cinderella fairytale. 

Review: BLOOD WILL TELL by Christine Pope

A woman searching for her father’s killer.

A man looking for his next score.

Miala has nothing in common with inter-galactic adventurer Eryk Thorn, but when fate throws them together, they discover they have more in common than an instinct for survival. 

Author Christine Pope returns to the sci fi world of Breath of Life in this sexy, savvy space opera. 

Blood Will Tell begins with  Miala undercover in the compound of Arlen Mast, the  criminal mastermind who had her father killed. She's determined to take her vengeance and clean out his treasury while she's at it and she's got the hacker skills to do just that.

When fate intervenes and she finds herself in a position to claim Mast's booty, she also finds herself partnered up with the notorious Eryk Thorn, who hides his face under wrappings and keeps his past a secret.

But he's not the only one with secrets, and the longer Miala is around Thorn, the more complicated it gets. And just when we think we know how it's going to end, Pope surprises us by raising the stakes, raising the temperature and raising our expectations. The book is Pope's best yet. Not only that, but this book reads like the first in a series. I can't wait.