WHISPER MUSIC
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From Sunbury Books
What if the Virgin Mary was bitten by a vampire? Danyaela Morrigan is an ex-Catholic, ex-college student, and ex-human, furious at the God who allowed her to be turned into a demoness. In the mountain town of Medjugorje, where the Blessed Virgin is rumored to appear, Danyaela seeks to share her eternal curse with the Mother of God. In the bitter, destructive battle that follows, she becomes afflicted with the power to enter the spirit world and touch the soul of every human being at will.
On Christmas Day, two Boston cops unwittingly find the body of a man who used to hunt vampires. Following the twisted trail, Detectives Blake and McArdle uncover the disappearance of a girl called Danyaela—and the woman known as Lady Claudia, who turned her. As they track the mortal servants of the damned, they draw ever closer to the heart of the Dark Lady’s plan to return from Hell for a virgin birth and a resurrection of her own.
But the thirsting dead and the hunters from the Vatican are both thrown out of their plans when Danyaela meets Blake and begins to remember ordinary human friendship. Her strange new powers have cracked the ancient detente between the Lord God and the Lord Satan, and the mortal world is becoming the field of all-out battle, as she finds herself questioning her loyalties for the first time in twelve years. When Easter comes, many things will arise from the shadows of death—for good, or for evil.
STORIES
Gods, demons, elves, vampires, robots, martial artists, imaginative children, and people who drink too much. My work has appeared in Aphelion, Asymmetry, Bottom Shelf Whiskey, Blood Moon Rising, Danse Macabre, Hickory Stump, Horror Zine, Infernal Ink, Liquid Imagination, Longshot Island, Page & Spine, Theme of Absence, and Unfit Magazine. Here's a link or two!
THE HYPERION
The Hyperion is a poetical form of my own invention, designed to crush the coal of our language into diamond. The basic form is an eight-line stanza in iambic tetrameter, with every other syllable rhyming in an A/B, D/E pattern with a C end rhyme on the even-numbered lines. After line four, this pattern reverses, going E/D, B/A. So a stanza rhyme scheme looks like this:
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uAuBuAuB
uAuBu ' uC
uDuEuDuE
uDuEu ' uC
uEuDuEuD
uEuDu ' uC
uBuAuBuA
uBuAu ' uC
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Give it a try, boys and girls! It's Saiyan-level training for your brain.
Here and there, mostly in Dappled Things. It's an awesome magazine, look 'em up!
(Oh yeah, and I blog at jbtoner.blogspot.com and tweet at AntiheroCouplet@twitter.com.)
CONTACT
