Night of the Victorian Dead
I have a rich,
conflict-filled gothic novel delicately laced with sly humor entitled NIGHT OF
THE VICTORIAN DEAD. It’s 90,000
words, and the first book of a completed trilogy: Jane Eyre
meets Gosford Park, in Night
of the Living Dead, where
imagination and suspense reign over splatter-gore. And the knowing modern reader can enjoy accompanying
unsuspecting characters down the road to the inevitable, while themselves
encountering mysteries and unexpected twists along the way.
Victorian Dead is
“Speculative Literature” with commercial appeal for readers of Susanna Clark,
Gail Carriger, and Mary Robinette Kowal.
As well as the many readers of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and the other Quirk Books’ sequels and offshoots,
whose appetites have been whetted by the blending of manners and horror, and
now crave even more original stories.
Like this one: Welcome to Romero Park. Among the green, rolling hills of Old England, the fields lie ripe and ready for reaping under a blighted Harvest Moon. While tenants and servants beware the eerie light, Mr. Edward Dorchester invites several families of his acquaintance to a ball at his country estate to celebrate the engagement of his ward to a most eligible neighbor. Among all the usual hopes and anticipation a ball inevitably excites, who has time to worry about a servant gone missing, and a coach found overturned and abandoned along the road?
It’s driven by six passionate, multi-faceted POV characters: the host, desperate to seize his last chance for happiness, and his foreign ward struggling to pass herself off as a Blushing English Rose. The governess who pines for her employer, while seeking to free him from blackmail, and the reclusive apothecary working there under false pretenses. A local beauty growing into her own person, and a young gentleman finding great satisfaction in playing the indispensable manservant.
The unsuspecting attendees of a country ball, they are all too busy striving to hide secrets and make matches to see what’s going on around them until it’s almost too late!
Like this one: Welcome to Romero Park. Among the green, rolling hills of Old England, the fields lie ripe and ready for reaping under a blighted Harvest Moon. While tenants and servants beware the eerie light, Mr. Edward Dorchester invites several families of his acquaintance to a ball at his country estate to celebrate the engagement of his ward to a most eligible neighbor. Among all the usual hopes and anticipation a ball inevitably excites, who has time to worry about a servant gone missing, and a coach found overturned and abandoned along the road?
It’s driven by six passionate, multi-faceted POV characters: the host, desperate to seize his last chance for happiness, and his foreign ward struggling to pass herself off as a Blushing English Rose. The governess who pines for her employer, while seeking to free him from blackmail, and the reclusive apothecary working there under false pretenses. A local beauty growing into her own person, and a young gentleman finding great satisfaction in playing the indispensable manservant.
The unsuspecting attendees of a country ball, they are all too busy striving to hide secrets and make matches to see what’s going on around them until it’s almost too late!
Sleepwaking
I have a modern-day adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass for adults: SLEEPWAKING is a 65,000 word, completed and original, novel for the literary and commercial fiction markets.
Like the original, this version plays with words, whimsy, and contains original nonsense verse. It’s a fun, quirky read, with all the pleasure of looking at challenging times with bearable lightness.
Alice has left the safety of corporate employment. Flying in to Portland, it’s her first day on her first job as a freelance consultant and she finds herself effectively having two bosses. The day turns into an ambush on her self-esteem. The red-headed and the white-haired bosses are in conflict and they keep putting Alice in the middle.
With not just her job, and her new career, but her self-respect on the line, Alice knows she must rise to the occasion tomorrow morning. She gratefully escapes to her hotel: the McMenamin’s Edgefield. The place is suffused with so much whimsy and creativity, who knows what might happen there! And indeed, instead of going to bed, she gets restless (the good kind) – her imagination gears up until she passes through the mirror in her room.
Believing herself to be in a particularly vivid dream, Alice allows the Red Queen to assign her to a living chess game as a Pawn. With each ‘move,' Alice encounters a host of colorfully eccentric characters who challenge her to some of the trials and tribulations of being shy in a quest to overcome self-doubt.
She meets the two Artists in Residence (Michael Gumm and Michael Lee) – who ‘nary can agree,’ and has a run in with the White Queen who gives Alice’s belief-muscles a good work-out. She’s challenged by Frumpy-Grumpy, an amalgam of difficult people and bullies from her past. She discovers she is a fabulous monster (in the best way), and is escorted ‘to be queened’ by a White Knight who may or may not be a fellow regular guy having his own adventures in Wonderland.
Once crowned Alice must face the eternal question: ‘chicken or fish?’ and assert her own ideas on established conventions in her first act as queen there, before she’s ready to return and face the real world queens back at work.
Like the original, this version plays with words, whimsy, and contains original nonsense verse. It’s a fun, quirky read, with all the pleasure of looking at challenging times with bearable lightness.
Alice has left the safety of corporate employment. Flying in to Portland, it’s her first day on her first job as a freelance consultant and she finds herself effectively having two bosses. The day turns into an ambush on her self-esteem. The red-headed and the white-haired bosses are in conflict and they keep putting Alice in the middle.
With not just her job, and her new career, but her self-respect on the line, Alice knows she must rise to the occasion tomorrow morning. She gratefully escapes to her hotel: the McMenamin’s Edgefield. The place is suffused with so much whimsy and creativity, who knows what might happen there! And indeed, instead of going to bed, she gets restless (the good kind) – her imagination gears up until she passes through the mirror in her room.
Believing herself to be in a particularly vivid dream, Alice allows the Red Queen to assign her to a living chess game as a Pawn. With each ‘move,' Alice encounters a host of colorfully eccentric characters who challenge her to some of the trials and tribulations of being shy in a quest to overcome self-doubt.
She meets the two Artists in Residence (Michael Gumm and Michael Lee) – who ‘nary can agree,’ and has a run in with the White Queen who gives Alice’s belief-muscles a good work-out. She’s challenged by Frumpy-Grumpy, an amalgam of difficult people and bullies from her past. She discovers she is a fabulous monster (in the best way), and is escorted ‘to be queened’ by a White Knight who may or may not be a fellow regular guy having his own adventures in Wonderland.
Once crowned Alice must face the eternal question: ‘chicken or fish?’ and assert her own ideas on established conventions in her first act as queen there, before she’s ready to return and face the real world queens back at work.
