Aixa and the Shark

Part two of my three-part La Bruja Roja series is free for the next five days. Check it out here.  It's urban fantasy about a witch who lives in a border town that's not just on the border between Texas and Mexico, it's on the border between life and death. The final story, Aixa and the Spider, will be out next month. I'm fond of the Aixa stories.  Maybe you'll like them too.

Aixa and the Scorpion--an excerpt and a freebie

I'll be giving away part one of my three-part urban fantasy series  (La Bruja Roja) for the next five days.  I originally wrote the series under the pseudonym Delia Fontana and over the year or so it's been available, Joy Sillesen has played with the covers, trying out everything from a neat grunnge graphic to the current trio of very paranormal covers. I've loved all the covers and wish I could use them all. This excerpt is from the opening of Aixa and the Scorpion. If you'd like to read more, go grab the freebie on Amazon. And I would LOVE a review if you like it.

   AIXA AND THE SCORPION

When you live in a place called Sangre de Cristo, it almost goes without saying that sometimes not-so-ordinary things are going to happen. In the years I was growing up here, Sangre was mostly just a sleepy little border town straddling the line between Texas and Mexico.

Americans crossed the border in search of cheap drugs and cheap booze and donkey sex shows and Mexicans traveled in the other direction looking for jobs and opportunities and green cards.

We didn’t get many tourists in Sangre de Cristo, so while we weren’t entirely immune to the problems faced by people in Matamoros or El Paso, we were mostly insulated from the bad stuff.

At least we were until 2006 when the drug wars exploded and the fallout left towns on both sides of the border radioactive with cocaine and machismo.

By then I was already living in Austin, taking classes at UT, and trying to figure out my place in the world.

I am a modern woman, but I am heir to an old, old tradition. And the power that I have skips generations. It’s why my mother, who was born in Brownsville, fled the U.S. in the final weeks of her pregnancy, determined that I should be born in Mexico so that I’d be a citizen of both nations. Both nations and two worlds.

She died giving birth to me, which is like something out of a 19^th century novel. My father, who had loved her very much, never forgave her for leaving him and basically abandoned me in Sangre de Cristo to grow up in my abuela’s house.

For my 14^th birthday my father sent me a present—a Bratz doll—and then two weeks later showed up in Sangre de Cristo knocking on my grandmother’s door with more presents and a sheepish smile.

La Bruja Roja is free on Kindle

Who doesn't like freebies? I mentioned Delia Fontana's Aixa & the Scorpion last week. Now it's free on Kindle for the next five days. If you fancy horror that's not the same old/same old, give it a try.

Sunday Friend Promotion Delia Fontana's Aixa & the Scorpion

One of the things that annoys me about a lot of horror stories is that they all seem to be based on the same old, same old European/Catholic tropes. When I read a story that doesn't fall back on that, it makes me happy. (In fact, one of the best zombie movie scripts I have read lately integrated voodoo, biochemistry, and social issues and was set in the sugar cane fields of Florida.)

Delia Fontana has started up a new series she calls La Bruja Roja (the Red Witch) with an intial story of 11,000 words. She has four stories in the initial series, and will be publishing them serially, once a month. At that point (December), she'll combine them in one package, add some bonus material (like a Blu-Ray release) and then move into her next sequence of tales, The Poison Heart.

She published the first instalment Aixa & the Scorpion over the weekend. It'll be followed by Aixa & the Shark, Aixa & the Shadow, and Aixa & the Spider.  the stories are set in a town that straddles the Texas/Mexico border but also marks the dividing line between life and death. She describes Sangre de Cristo as a place much like the Bon Temps of True Blood, a place where the paranormal is the normal. If you'd like to read a horror story with a decidedly Hispanic twist, check it out!