Chris Lux Hayes has typed up an array of novels in the fantasy: magical realism genre. The author loves assembling and nailing down novels best of all.
BUDDHA REX
Word count: 80,000
Buddha Rex showcases the adventures of a red fox named Crazy, who has a life-scrambling encounter with a shapeshifting ghost while going about his routine vulpine duties in a collegiate arboretum.
With his coat now absinthe green and his mind bizarrely humanized, Crazy exits his life as a savvy woodland rascal and plunges into the role of a mystical cryptid hunted by enforcers of a UFO religion.
Crazy shakes out as the unwilling cornerstone hero in a war with two primal fronts. One, Earth is under attack by an extradimensional horror that survived the death of its universe and then opted to track down and assassinate God, aka the Supreme Such-And-Such.
Two, reality is under attack by an A-list movie megastar, aka the Mother of Odd, who loves Crazy and thinks he would be better off enlightened.
Buddha Rex mobilizes all the elements for a chaos-realm, mind-snapping thriller, including:
-
Selkie Sixby One green fox on the run
- One Hollywood goddess abducted by extradimensionals
- One total-war girl called OMG
- Two ex-Marine outlaw bikers
- Two fairy-touched campus coeds
- One mafia-style college fraternity
- One teen savant with an alien manitou
- One vengeful trillionaire from the future
- One fairyland detective
- One crew of hardcore MS-13 commandos
- One batch of gruesome otherworld obtruders
- One 600-year-old love affair between a rogue samurai and a nine-tailed fox witch
Bottom line: The ghost in the woods gives our green fox a quick lesson in mysticism with a focus on pure awareness as the true identity of any entity or nonentity—sentient, insentient, or otherwise.
“The knower is king,” the ghost tells Crazy, “but the queen is all and everything he knows.”
And so the war begins…
According to Wikipedia: “The fox appears in the folklore of many cultures, but especially European and East Asian, as a figure of cunning, trickery, or as a familiar animal possessed of magic powers, and sometimes associated with transformation.”
Excerpt from BUDDHA REX
Nemesis Grail came equipped with the core hotness of Brigitte Bardot souped up with the lethal allure of Salome and Vampirella. Mental powers associated with research scientists and spymasters amplified her looks, propelling her into acting and an overnight A-list career in Hollywood.
Nemesis was only 17 when she won a Best Actress in a Supporting Role Oscar for her debut portrayal of Candy Jane Jones, the American-born cyberterrorist who helped bring down 700 passenger airliners across North America in the holiday blockbuster, Frequent Pyre Day.
Presley Fronch, a film critic at The New Yorker, suffered a crush at first sight. “We all thought star power was dead,” Fronch began in her frothy review of the newcomer’s performance in FPD. “Nemesis Grail proves we all thought wrong. As Candy Jane Jones, Grail freebases your brain and kicks your heart in the nuts. You want to lock her in your basement and feed her chunks of your own body.”
Fronch was not alone in her infatuation. Once moviegoers got a look at Nemesis, social media and entertainment news went va-voom. Nemesis shot to the top of People’s Celebrity Hot List. Twenty-four months later, she landed the seventh slot on the Forbes Celebrity 100, making a strong showing across various metrics, including web and TV mentions.
After FPD, Nemesis went on to make two to three films a year over the next nine years, winning a Best Actress in a Leading Role Oscar for her work in Rear Naked, the story of Bekka “The Succubus” Bocker, the German MMA bantamweight who killed two women in the cage. Rear Naked posted a worldwide opening weekend topping $650 million, which placed the movie in Avengers and Furious territory.
A year or so later, Nemesis was in Utah filming a new movie, MKUltra, where she played a call girl forcibly recruited as a test subject in the LSD, hypnosis, and sex experiments conducted during a lighthearted CIA mind-control project in the 1960s.
BUDDHA REX Synopsis
THE ENDARKENED SERIES
Chaya is Book One of The Endarkened Series, which features four novels, one complete—Chaya, two underway—Gungnir and Badrinath, and a fourth—Nexoxcho, in its planning phase. The novels are centered on the adventures of Mars Lahar, a tier-above-one mercenary, and a mystical combat assault dog named Gungnir, aka Gunny.
Lahar is a killer savant. He is also a birdwatcher, mythology buff, ex-Delta operator, and top counterassassin for a private military company (PMC) called Headstone.
Gunny is a war dog from another dimension. He rules as a giant schnauzer—a black-moon juggernaut with a mischievous streak. He is Lahar’s best friend and battle buddy.
When they stay focused, Mars and Gungnir spell living doom for first-hierarchy supervillains, global terrorists, and archdemons along with their assorted allies and well-wishers.
Book One: CHAYA
Word count: 95,000
Once a legendary maverick in Delta and then Sunshine, the latter a “nonexistent” CIA antiterrorist group, Mars Lahar now works as an elite operator at Headstone, a white-shoe PMC with a blue-chip clientele. Lahar is sent on a booby-trap mission to Colombia by Brink Veyron, his evil boss at Headstone. Veyron’s primo monsters, Christian, an Inuit ogre, and Mr. Sticks, a venomous wight, function as Lahar’s unnatural-born foes.
El Coco, a master torturer, is under orders to convert Lahar into flesh-and-blood kryptonite Veyron can use to cripple the omniscience of Grusha Blaga, a cosmogonist-cum-witch. Veyron needs to dominate the witch and compel her to save him from Rudraji, an invincible wereleopard assassin from the Himalayas.
Lahar falls in love with Lozen Reaver, a Headstone operator prospect, before he heads off for Colombia, where he meets Chaya, a mysterious Amazon rainforest girl with a mission all her own. Lozen, also ex-Delta, is abducted by the Simons, the robogolems at Deadfall, Headstone’s operator-selection concentration camp.
Clover Novikova is Mars Lahar’s Headstone handler and his only serious human friend. Christian and Mr. Sticks save Clover from the Simons, but she falls under Brink Veyron’s nefarious control. Clover is forced to betray Lahar, but she tries to fix things later on by presenting him with a giant schnauzer puppy he names Gungnir and welcomes as his blood brother.
Lahar must fight his way back from El Coco’s brainwashing opus by going on a horrifying ayahuasca trip in the deep jungle. He has help from Chaya along with a harpy eagle, his newfound totem animal, and Gungnir, who is watching over him from a spectral holding area, waiting to once again gate-crash the earthside plane.
The name, Mars, belongs to the Roman god of war, but was later abducted and awarded to the fourth rock from the Sun in our solar system, aka the Red Planet.
According to Wikipedia: “A lahar is a violent type of mudflow or debris flow composed of a slurry of pyroclastic material, rocky debris, and water. The material flows down from a volcano, typically along a river valley. Lahars are extremely destructive.”
Excerpt from CHAYA
Our Man in Witch Country
Christian takes a sloppy swig of beer from a pitcher, his version of a mug. Mr. Sticks samples something morbidly green in a martini glass, possibly absinthe mixed with liquid uranium. Veyron isn’t drinking.
“Lahar, I hear you had smooth sailing in the Philippines,” Veyron declares, his tone bright and sociable. “Novikova gave me a full report. You are quite the little operator.”
I give him an opaque look before turning to Christian. “Take thy foam from off thy puss,” I recommend. “Quoth the meathead ‘Nevermore.’”
Christian frowns, sensing an insult.
“He means the beer suds on your upper lip,” Mr. Sticks explains, rolling his eyes.
“Yeah, what of it?” Christian grunts, aiming his resentment at Mr. Sticks, who sips his drink and ignores him. Christian studies his associate for one long dull moment before turning back to me. He quaffs more beer and then wipes his mouth with a sleeve of his sweater. “I don’t like you, Lahar, but my boss says I can’t use your skull as a pincushion for your ribs.”
I turn to Veyron. “Why not? Where’s the harm?”
Veyron regards me with a glossy smile. “Christian, tell Lahar you’re sorry,” he orders without moving his gaze from my face. “Threatening coworkers is always objectionable.”
Christian makes a seething noise.
Veyron lifts the toe of one shoe as if to tap his foot.
“Okay, I’m sorry,” Christian utters in a strangled voice, his vast face manifesting clusters of minute contortions. Veins near his temples fidget like antsy nightcrawlers.
I’m six-one, but Christian is a good head taller—and that head is gargantuan. He’s built like a super-sized sumo wrestler, but without of a stitch of flab. Even a love tap from one of his wrecking-ball fists would be calamitous. Anyone squaring off against Christian hand to hand would do well to stick and move to another continent.
“Sticks, how would you describe that pattern?” I ask, pointing at Christian’s sweater. “I’m going with a rabid octopus disemboweling a kaleidoscope.”
Mr. Sticks shakes his head. “More like five acidheads sodomizing a rainbow.”
Christian starts grinding his teeth, making a worrisome rumbling noise.
Veyron clears his throat. “I have some news for you, Lahar.”
I’m preparing for another exchange with Mr. Sticks, but pause to give Veyron a sideways look. “News?”
“Yes, I’ve already lined up a new mission for you. You’ll be shipping out to Colombia ASAP. Novikova will give you the details.”
CHAYA: Synopsis
Book Two: GUNGNIR
Underway • Projected word count: 90,000
Mars and Gunny have insane adventures on an unnamed island in the Malay Archipelago, including run-ins with maniacal poachers, mystical jungle animals, an undiscovered indigenous tribe of quasi-aliens, a vampire tiger girl, and a colossal hermit marauder gone amok.
Lozen Reaver duels to the death or madness with the Simons at Deadfall. One wickedly powerful Simon gets a big-time crush on her, a development that invites a perilously horrific opportunity.
Clover Novikova resides at Brink Veyron’s haunted estate near Dirtfield, Headstone’s host city in Minnesota, and cultivates bizarre relationships with Tereza, Veyron’s creepy showpiece wife, and the power couple’s three children of the damned and/or corn. Clover gives birth to identical twins, a boy and girl who look a lot like Mars Lahar (he doesn’t know about them).
The three story lines eventually converge in a charming example of mayhem-order elegance.
Odin, the Norse All-Father, owns a perfectly balanced spear named Gungnir, which always finds its target and always returns home.
Known for producing legendary war and security beasts, the giant schnauzer breed claims a diversified heritage. According to Wikipedia: “Sources speculate the breed originated through some combination of black great Danes, German shepherds, Rottweilers, Dobermanns, boxers, Bouvier des Flandres, Thuringian shepherds, and the standard schnauzer.”
Book Three: BADRINATH
Word count: 86,000 • Needs overhaul to better align with CHAYA and GUNGNIR
Mars and Gungnir go on a mission to Badrinath, a Himalayan holy city in India. They’re hunting Rudraji, a galaxy-class wereleopard assassin, and end up in a spectacular duel with Swami Papananda, an international guru/crime boss.
Lozen Reaver, Vigga Huginnsdóttir, a future neo-zombie and Lahar’s spiritual sister, Sumdumfuk, a storybook mountain yogi who might be Lahar’s gurudeva, and the Pawan orphans, Dublin, Berlin, and Madrid, join Mars and Gunny to throw down on Brink Veyron, Christian, Mr. Sticks, fire teams of demonized Gurkhas, bioengineered killer chimpanzees, and Karkov, an enormous white Russian terrier and world champion pit fighter.
According to Wikipedia: “Badrinath is a Hindu holy town and a nagar panchayat in Chamoli district in the state of Uttarakhand, India. The town is one of the four sites in India’s Char Dham pilgrimage circuit.”
Vyasa, a bygone kingpin rishi, reportedly lived in a cave in the Himalayas near Badrinath around 3000 BCE.
Excerpt from BADRINATH
Vigga peers at the TV, her lower lip drooping in astonishment. “Swamiji?” she peeps.
“Lucky for you, I am all-forgiving in all cases,” Papananda says. “With the merest wisp of a thought, I now erase all your karmic debts for the next week or so. Return to your home and wait piously for my darshan.”
“Save it, pops,” I say. “She’s done with your song and dance.”
He turns his head imperiously to consider me through narrowed eyes. “You’re early, Mr. Lahar. Our meeting is for tomorrow at high noon. Your outrageous disregard for my instructions now forces me to cancel that appointment.”
“Sure, whatever,” I say. “What are you doing right now?”
Papananda looks at Vigga. “Is he always this obtuse?”
Vigga shrugs. “Let’s just say he’s missing a few peas in his casserole.”
“A casserole is a mixed-food mass baked in a special dish called a casserole,” I say. “You know, like a swamp deer casserole.”
“I know what a casserole is, Mr. Lahar.”
“Good, then you know Headstone is ready to turn your entire operation into hamburger stroganoff. We need to sit down and hammer out this trouble with that leopardish hitman, what’s-his-name, uh, Rudraji. You can still walk away from this deal smelling like a slimeball.”
Book Four: NEXOXCHO
Planning phase • Projected word count: 90,000
Mars, Lozen, Vigga, and Gungnir go after the Los Zetas narcoterrorists who truck-bombed Lozen’s immediate family. The narcos are backed up by super-crack North Korean commandos and devilish black-hat hackers looted from the NSA.
Mars and his team get on the wrong side of an Aztec biker gang with occult connections to Nexoxcho, the Aztec goddess of fear, and Xolotl, the Aztec canine deity of doom.
While in Mexico, Mars searches for the imperial woodpecker, ranked as the planet’s largest woodpecker. Last seen in 1956 and listed as critically endangered on the IUCN Red List, the imperial is most likely extinct.
Meanwhile back in Dirtfield, Minnesota, the Pawan orphans plus Mars and Clover’s twin children have formed a blended family and are having misadventures all their own.
GHOUL STORY
Underway • Projected word count: 100,000
Mothwood lives in an old-growth cemetery in the heart of downtown Gingko Park, an affluent suburb of Minneapolis. Mothwood is a deep-world ghoul, meaning he once worked as a champion enforcer for various vampire cartels for thousands and thousands of years. He recently retired, but his ex-master vampire’s high-handed attitude and other circumstances are making his life anything but easy.
Tuyen Jokinen, aka Cazz Croydon, is an FBI shadow agent who hunts down and murders supercriminals too intelligent, vicious, dangerous, and powerful to risk inclusion on the 10 Most Wanted Fugitives list.
Rong Regenbogen lives on the mean streets of Gingko Park. Rong is an 18-year-old drug addict—she got hooked after just one injection of Empusa, an opiate upgrade vastly more potent (and sorcerous) than carfentanil. Empusa herself is a vampire demigoddess who devours psychic energy, skinwalks like a pro, and heads the strongest vampire cartel.
Mothwood, Tuyen, and Rong are thrown together in a blood-secret war that involves two upper-crust American crime syndicates, three vampire cartels, a psychotic police detective on a greed spree, and Siberia Runarsen, a rebel ghoul who terrifies vampires and humans alike.
According to Wikipedia: “A ghoul is a demon-like being or monstrous humanoid. The concept originated in pre-Islamic Arabian religion associated with graveyards and the consumption of human flesh. Modern fiction often uses the term to label a certain kind of undead monster.”
Excerpt from GHOUL STORY
Denise and Melissa aim their faces in my direction. The sisters are holding court in the center of a king-size bed, framed like fair-skinned zoo creatures by my desktop monitor. Their identically sumptuous bodies are clad in matching zipper-front teddies in lavender leather. The milfy twins cuddle on their knees, pretending to be dazed and vulnerable, their duplicate masses of frosted-black hair splashing randomly to commingle in glistening ringlets.
“Are you really a reporter?” Melissa questions, making eye contact via a webcam with a private-show visitor who reset their recreational trajectory with press credentials and an interview request. She is plainly wondering if I’m not some stalker or perv or worse hiding behind anti-biometric camouflage. “Siberia is ancient history.”
“Like I said, I’m an investigative journalist with Sky News.”
“That’s why he has a British accent,” Denise points out. “Sky News is based in the United Kingdom.”
My motion-capture camo has a British accent, not me. My camo is coded to render an overripe, factory-class wolf with French-Norse bloodlines and nothing except Baracuta and/or Paul Smith in his wardrobe. He has Wonder-Bread skin, eyes like titanium marbles, shaggy hooligan hair, and a street-wizened face. The software named him Cazz Croydon.
I have used my Croydon online camo on numerous occasions—I distrust random disguises. Croydon’s legend can withstand refined background checks, and his mannerisms are uncanny valley-proof. The scurvy Brit seems real enough even to me, but we aren’t exchanging Christmas cards or arguing about the best new fairway woods. Croydon is a heathen-nativist populist spiritually inclined to write feel-good pieces about the peckerwood gang subculture in the United States penal system.
As for me, I speak English with an American “neutral” accent along with seven other languages with native-depth fluency. I am what ethnologists call a cultural cuttlefish. My bloodlines labeled me a Scandinasian, meaning I have Vietnamese and Finnish ancestry. During the bulk of my FBI shadow career, I hunted the kingpins and enforcers of organized hate groups based in North America.
My job objective focused on transforming fanatical, bias-motivated criminals into role models of four-phase mortis: putrefaction, decomposition, skeletonization, and finally fossilization. Just recently, I was tasked with tracking down a lone subject, one who made the most vicious Atomwaffen and Hammerskin meatfuckers look like babes in the woods.
Not much in my paternal or maternal lineage supports the development of my particular skill set. Thanks to upscale DNA testing kits enhanced by nanotechnology, my mother traced her roots to the Sa Huỳnh culture, which thrived in the Mekong Delta in modern-day Vietnam during the Iron Age. Her ancestors wore jade earrings depicting two-headed antelopes and buried the cremains of their departed in lidded pots. They traded goods with merchants as far away as Taiwan and the Philippines.
“The Mekong River dribbles from a glacial spring on the Tibetan Plateau,” my mother typically spouted when asked about her heritage, “and rambles all the way to the South China Sea. As a child, I swam with giants in Mekong waters, including dog-eating catfish and Siamese barbs, but I am not a river monster.”
“Why do you tell people that?” my father would ask her.
“I want them to like me,” my mother would reply.
My father’s ancestral constitution is a different story. Using more metaphysical methods that relied on crystals, runes, newt bones, and pendulums, he traced his roots to Kuu Caverns in pre-glacial Finland, linking him to the only Neanderthal pioneers to ever reach the Nordic region.
According to the Greek lunamancer, Bion of Lepreum, aka the “Father of the Moon,” the typical Kuu cave dweller lived to the age of 75—greatly outpacing more southerly Neanderthals, who rarely reached the age of 40 due to their big-trauma lifestyles. Kuu citizens embalmed their departed and displayed the lifelike cadavers in hollow, translucent stalactites inside their homes. Gold was such a huge thing in Kuu society that hostages and POWs were manacled and shackled in gold-alloy chains.
“Kuu ruled as the tallest, brightest, and most attractive examples of protohuman beings in any era,” my father used to say. “Their descendants became brilliant marauders, wizards, and goldsmiths. They thrived in subterranean city-states that flourished thousands of years ago in present-day Finland.”
“Oh, that frozen, dim bulb of a country,” my mother liked to respond, “home to suicide metalheads, brooding weirdos, and soundless mopes. All those rude, boozy Finns aren’t even Scandinavian, technically speaking.”
“I never say anything bad about Vietnam,” my father protested, looking hurt. “I love pink lotuses, water puppetry, and woodblock prints of carp.”
“Everyone loves water puppetry,” my mother grunted. “Say, did you know introverted Finns stare at their shoes when they’re talking to you. Extroverted Finns stare at your shoes.”
MOONBOW
Word count: 116,000 • Undergoing overhaul
Rune Vandal is an old-pro guardsman in the FOG, or Freedom Overwatch Guard. Vandal works for the mysterious Joss Bosses and uses combat mantras to kill people. He is disillusioned and burning out, but still extremely competent at his job.
Ukko Bookhouse is an isolation worker with Biolence Industries. Ukko mans a black-site warehouse in an exclusion forest. He happens across a goon quoll, a brand of mammal once known for its five-star vicious streak, but soon enough relegated to a long line of extinction-class Earthlings.
Ukko figures the quoll is synthetically grown by sinister Biolence scientistas. He knows taking in the chompy little fiendbot is stupid, but they somehow become friends, an outcome that eventually persuades Ukko to quit his job—a BIG no-no.
Guardsman Vandal is ordered to track down the vile deserter and dispose of him. The goon quoll, aka Crikey, flips the script and starts a mini-rebellion that leads the way to Moonbow, a Hawaiian princess who steamrolls Ukko’s heart. That love story provokes a gruesome showdown with the Joss Bosses.
According to Wikipedia: “A moonbow (also known as a moon rainbow or lunar rainbow) is a rainbow produced by moonlight rather than direct sunlight. Other than the difference in the light source, its formation is the same as for a solar rainbow. Because the light is usually too faint to excite the cone color receptors in human eyes, it is difficult for the human eye to discern colors in a moonbow. As a result, a moonbow often appears to be white.”
Excerpt from MOONBOW
Ukko Bookhouse
Supervisors are gifted with lukewarm first names. This example is called Boyce. The name is Magic-Markered on a “hello” sticker on his brownish Biolence branded T-shirt. Long-dead graphic artists had selected Pantone 448 C, also known as opaque couché, as the panoramic monopoly’s primary identifying pigment, which an offended TIME reporter once described as the “world’s ugliest color.”
In earlier times, people encountering the drab, French-mole obscenity conjured words like “lung gunk” and “filth infusion” and “sour poop.” Biolence augmented the effect with its creepy, old sun logo, which insinuated itself pretty much everywhere.
Boyce has his management-approved special thought printed on his T-shirt: “Let us do the thinking.” Both the company name and his special thought display the Biolence branded font, Stooge Pork, which respectable typographers once snubbed as an ungodly typeface too gauche to use even for memes.
Let us do the thinking, Ukko considers, keeping his expression dreary and too dense to read. Amen to that, he adds a second later, recalling his own internal meme, which more often than not is imbued with skepticism.
Ukko considers Boyce’s underdeveloped face. The man’s eyes are cold and small, his skin Nosferatu-white with invisible pores. His idea of facial hair is a skimpy mustache—the DIY talisman of Biolence supervisors, aka weasel kittens.
Boyce’s smile opens like a fissure, confirming the mentality of a henpecked underling, balsa-boned, factory-assembled in a jiffy, and unprepared in all areas except arrogance.
“Emergency terrabarges are getting offloaded from container ships at Blinch Harbor as I speak,” Boyce declares, making weird faces while moving his arms like an interpreter for the deaf. “ETA at this classified hub is 1700 hours or four hours from now. Don’t worry, Bookhouse, we have a capable crew of covert coworkers inbound on a shuttle.”
Ukko does his best to mimic a still life of excitement. Boyce is excited. And why not? Biolence Industries is by far the largest, most dominant business/government entity on the planet. The supersized monopoly (unofficially called a global plunderbund) fields a workforce with nearly 5 billion devotees (not employees) and total assets topping ₿2.5 billion, or roughly US$100 trillion in bygone days.
The next closest monopoly, Screwworm Group, is less than a third that size. The last Ukko heard only three sovereign countries still existed, Cuba, Laos, and Nepal. Good news maybe except Ukko also heard those countries are the pet projects of a Biolence Joss Boss.
Joss Boss, he silently repeats, feeling an evil chill. Biolence has more than several and those top-tier executives are the new gods, their AI-generated identities and mythic names breeding a blend of adoration, terror, and hatred in the monopoly’s plebs and zubs. Kwinkan, Maman Brigitte, Chernobog, Apophis—with deities like that, who needs devils?
THE BLACK SWAN OF WAR
Word Count: 350,000 😬 • Yup, needs full-on morphing into a three-book series
The Black Swan of War mirrors the Ramayana, the Hindu epic about Rama, Sita, Hanuman, Lakshmana, and the demon, Ravana. That might not seem all that remarkable except I had never heard of the Ramayana and next to nothing about the Hindu pantheon until years after I had finished the novel.
The novel includes the main Ramayana characters and follows a similar plot, which has Ravana abducting Rama’s wife, Sita. Hanuman makes an appearance as Raja Brute, a GMO monkey and war machine who sides with Del Tundra, an ex-Marine Force Recon who stands in for Rama and battles demons in a paramilitary outfit called the Hellheads.
Sita is a U.S. Navy officer named Valkyrie Vale. She met and fell in love with Del Tundra when they served together during Operation Crushing Blow in North Korea. Laksmana, Rama’s brother, is portrayed by Jai Prem, a subcontinental Indian warrior prince my wife, Ginny, admires to this day. Ravana’s part is handled by a Brink Veyron-like villain named Peter Roffin (see above THE ENDARKENED SERIES).
I will return to this novel, my first, and make an avalanche of revisions before I cash in my keyboard. Jai Prem and Ginny wouldn’t have it any other way.
According to Wikipedia: “The black swan theory or theory of black swan events is a metaphor that describes an event that comes as a surprise, has a major effect, and is often inappropriately rationalized after the fact with the benefit of hindsight. The term is based on an ancient saying that presumed black swans did not exist—a saying that became reinterpreted to teach a different lesson after the first European encounter with them.”
Excerpt from THE BLACK SWAN OF WAR
Coming soon…🍺
GOD’S BLOODY EARTH
Underway • Projected word Count: 80,000
This book was going okay until Beatnik Bob showed up and dragged the plot into a bloated otherworld that made individual words in the narrative start twitching until they exploded and killed all my characters.
With luck, I’ll revisit this novel one day. I liked the bum named after Tepeyollotl, the Aztec god of jaguars and earthquakes. He’s down and out of it, but he can really handle himself.
Tepeyo uses his autonomic martial arts skills to go about saving a hardcore Latina banger named Luz Colazzo from Beatnik Bob and his league of ugly customers. That brave chola is one of my favorite all-time characters. I’m quite sure I can find and reassemble her body parts.
According to Wikipedia: “In Aztec mythology, Tepeyollotl (“heart of the mountains”) is the god of darkened caves, earthquakes, echoes, and jaguars. He is the god of the Eighth Hour of the Night, and is depicted as a jaguar leaping toward the sun.”
Excerpt from GOD’S BLOODY EARTH
Yaroslav bounded up and sideswiped Bleuzenn’s leg, knocking her off balance. She took a swat at his butt, missed, and grazed the tip of his furry, sickle-shaped tail.
“You behave, Yaro,” she whispered, feeling only briefly annoyed. She couldn’t keep from adoring her dog, a 145-pound black Russian terrier with a goofy streak. BRTs were formidable animals, but Yaroslav was a real monster. “I will beat you silly.”
Yaro aimed his massive, shaggy head in her direction and seemed to chuckle.
Bleuzenn started to respond, but stopped when she caught a flicker of motion in the branches of a nearby beech. A mammal of some sort, she thought, but one that set off her weird-o-meter. She was lifting her Zeiss binoculars to get a better look when she heard its startling call: “Bada-bing bada-boom.”
The mammal buzzed along a limb, a swoosh of muddy green, ears big enough for a bat. Squirrel? No, the body was all wrong, too big and crooked. Tail ribbed and hairless. Possum maybe? No, the thing had speed to bleed. Carried itself like a primate, its sunball eyes reminding Bleuzenn of a lemur or loris. The thing was out of sight now, but its call sounded again, “Bada-bing bada-boom.”
Yaroslav moved to her side, paused his panting, alert, watching the tree.
“Did you see it, Yaro?”
Yaroslav growled, the rumble radiant with menace.
Bleuzenn had heard stories about Flegflaw Woods. No person raised for ten minutes in Dirtfield hadn’t. The woods were haunted. Solitary fairies guarded hidden glades. Hobs and grim imps crowded knotholes and strange mounds.
But these dark folk ducked even the twinkle of stars and would never see their names in lights. That honor belonged to a lone primordial boogeyman, royal in his own way, a king of his kind. His aura added malice to every creeping shadow.
Quick as sound, he toured his woods, entering horrific claw marks on the trunks of sacred trees, discharging twilight screeches that stole the breath from itinerant angels, and caused demonic paladins to dribble black urine on their cloven hooves.
Evidently, he’d hunted dinosaurs in his youth. Ripped out the throats of overweening Allosaurs and snatched the horns off slow-footed Triceratopses. Nowadays, he blitzed human strays, runaways, and dayhikers, ravishing in the way of fiends, feasting as he fornicated.
Next to nothing documented, of course. But tales of terror exercised more authority than fact. The boogeyman had several names—Beatnik Bob (most prevalent), Mr. Inguma, Old Gory (apparently this one flew his own flag), Juddy Jugulate, and so on, but the one Bleuzenn disliked least was Jibril.
Apparently, Jibril had Islamic roots and was rumored to be a kind of jinn, or genie. His name was the Arabic variation of Gabriel, you know, God’s archangel messenger, the dude best known for immortalizing the line: “Stop fucking shooting me, okay?”
Bleuzenn was a sucker for folklore and urban myths, so she had naturally done some research. She had learned that jinn were not born evil or good, but made their way in the world somewhat like humans, bumbling about with broken compasses and treacherous maps.
Jibril did not seem like your typical made-in-Hollywood supermaniac—and genies were known for granting three wishes. Jibril sounded like someone open to reason and good faith. Bleuzenn could do without the likes of Beatnik Bob.
Contact the author…
