Good and Gothic--DREAM REAPER by Alistair Cross

 Remember the heyday of the Gothic novel, those books that all had the same cover--with the beautiful long-haired woman running from a castle/mansion/tower with one lighted window? (Here's a Pinterest board that proves my point.)

I gobbled those books up like  chocolate-covered cherries. The sub-genre is having something of a comeback right now and that is really good news for readers because the neo-Gothics are a lot more complicated and compelling than the Bronte imitators that spawned the first wave of books back in the Seventies. 

And I'm not even counting the O.G. Gothics, a list of which you can find here.

Which brings me to Alistair Cross and his novel Dream Reaper. Cross brings the goth with a capital G and this book delivers angels, demons, holy hell, and dark desires. 

The story takes place in a fictional California town where a new Chief of police has just arrived. Nick Grayson is looking for a fresh start but his initial impression of Prominence is not promising. He's afraid he's going to be bored to death with only the town's Fouinder's Day festivities to look forward to. (Town mascot Winkie the golden hedgehog figures prominently.) 

Just one day in, however, weird things start happening, and Nick finds himself caught up in a battle between good and evil. (Cue the Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil" as you start to read--you'll see why.)

The characters in Dream Reaper are fully fleshed out and real. Readers will immediately be caught up in heroine Madison's story because we know what we need to know about her before she has the accident that kicks off the narrative. Although the story takes place in present day, all the trappings and tropes of Gothic novels are in place. There are haunted rooms, whispering voices, an abandoned church, a cemetery with wrought-iron fences, and more. Dark secrets and hidden needs fuel the action as the battle between good and evil plays out. There are real stakes here--eternal stakes.

There are intense moments, as when a woman randomly admits to her greatest sin and several other women attack each other over a man neither one truly wants. The heroes and heroines of the story are all flawed, even broken, and that adds to their believability. 

The horror here is lightened with levity, and quirkiness, and emotions run the gamut. It's a terrific read.

A Tale of Two Covers

I love free books. And while I'm not what my best friend calls a "greedy grabber" (one of those people who scoops up freebies and never actually reads them), I have been known to actually fill my Kindle to capacity with free and bargain books.  and I have a lot of opportunities to do that because I'm subscribed to a couple of services that email me every morning with tempting books in every possible category. Today, on Freebooksy, Meg Xumei X's book Empress of Mysth caught my eye. It looked like something a little different in the paranormal romance genre, and I'm always looking for something different. (Killer angels!!)

The cover to the left is the one in the ad, and it caught my eye because it looks like an old school Tanith Lee cover. (I still miss Tanith Lee!)  It snagged my attention and then I read the blurb and clicked over to Amazon to claim my free book. Because ... free!  But also because I've read some of X's other books, including The Siren. I like her books. They always have high stakes (like the survival of the human race.) And they don't have cookie cutter characters. So, very much looking forward to reading this book. But when I clicked over, the cover below was the one on offer. And I tell you right now, if I'd seen that shirtless angel photoshop  cover, my eyes would have glided right past it.

I know there's been a lot of talk about "shirtless covers" and I've mostly kept out of it, but here's a real A/B test. To me, the book with the woman on the cover looks more interesting than the book with the shirtless angel. I'm not a prude, not at all. But the book above tells me the book is about a woman who is DOING SOMETHING. The shirtless angel cover tells me that the most important thing is the relationship with the shirtless angel. (Yes, I know it's a fantasy romance, but work with me here.)

Maybe if the guy's wings hadn't been off-center. (Because of the way his torso is turned, the wing on his left shoulder should have been turned as well and it isn't. The model has just been superimposed on the wings and it doesn't look great. In fact, it looks like a bazillion other covers you see in the Kindle book section.

I'm still looking forward to reading the book (which is #1 in one of his categories in the Free Book section right now), but I really wish the author had stuck with the original cover.

Angelfall by Susan Ee--a review

In a post-apocalyptic world, a human joins forces with an angel to rescue her little sister as a resistance movement launches its first mission against the supernatural creatures.

Definitely in the dystopian tradition of Hunger Games, this story of a world in which paranormal creatures rule the night has a fine, feisty heroine, an intriguing anti-hero angel without wings and a quest. It’s well-written but derivative (especially for readers of the genre in general and Hunger Games in particular).

PENRYN YOUNG is 17 and basically in charge of her family—her mentally ill mother and her disabled sister PAIGE—in the wake of world-wide apocalypse involving angel attacks. Everyone on earth saw GABRIEL, the Messenger of God, killed in Jerusalem and since then, angels have hunted and killed humans for their own uses.

            Penryn is uniquely suited to protect her family since her paranoid mother signed her up for a series of self-defense classes. That’s good because her mother is off her meds and unpredictable and her sister is useless. The family has been hiding out on the top floor of an apartment building, but the bands of roving gangs have been scavenging closer and closer for days. Penryn realizes it’s time to move and despite her mother’s terror of the night (when the streets are empty of humans but filled with all kinds of predators), she wants to move at night. With her mother pushing a shopping cart and Penryn pushing her baby sister in a wheelchair, the trio sets out.

L.A. Nocturne Collection--Urban Fantasy short stories set in Los Angeles

One of the first short stories I ever wrote for Dark Valentine Magazine was "Tired Blood," a tale of a vampire so old he'd developed dementia and forgotten he was a vampire. I liked the setting of the story so much that for the next few years, I kept writing stories set in my version of Los Angeles where the normal and paranormal co-exist. This fall, the novel based on that story, Misbegotten, will be published. (Better late than never.0 And as a run-up to that publication, I have released this colleciton of the "Misbegotten" short stories.

Some of these stories originally appeared in the collections L.A. Nocturne and L.A. Nocturne II, others have never been collected; a few were written just for this volume. I'm happy because the stories run the gamut. There are ghosts, shapeshifters (and not the usual kind), djinn, mermaids, sorcerers, demons, angels, and a were-bear. Also fairies. And unicorns and a centaur.

There are also vampires. Lots and lots of vampires. And a werewolf or two.  But not, I hope, your standard issue alpha wolf guys.  I hope you'll check out the collection. I had a great time writing these stories.