The upcoming, action-packed novel Rags and Muffin will release on December 10th, just in time for you to cozy up with it over Christmas break. Taking place in a sweltering city somewhere in the tropics and featuring a lot of fiery explosions, Rags and Muffin will help you think warm thoughts during the cold winter.
You can preview it right now. Chapters one through four are available as a PDF file:
Rags and Muffin Sample Chapters (PDF)
Here is a color version of the detail from the cover of Dead 2 Rites, which I previously posted in black and white. This is the sequel to Jake and the Dynamo, which will be available again soon in a newly revised text; when it goes up, Dead 2 Rites should simultaneously become available for pre-order.
The character featured here is Magical Girl Metal Huntress Vanessa Van Halensing, a vampire-hunting rock starlet who battles the forces of evil with her crucifix keytar. She plays, let us say, an instrumental role in the story that unfolds in this exciting second volume: Ancient conspiracies, alien gods, murderous cabals, and sugary foods come together in an effort to destroy the remnants of the human race—and only Jake and the Dynamo stand in the way!
I’ve received some images indicating the progress on the cover art for Dead to Rites, the next volume in the Jake and the Dynamo series.
I don’t think it would be any of my business to give details, but the talented artist doing the work has encountered a lot of problems in the process, almost as if some unseen power doesn’t want the book published. (I say that because I ran into strange trouble of my own while writing it.)
Anyway, things are moving along even if more slowly than I would have preferred. I have received a few images of the art, but post only the one here, as I figure I shouldn’t spoil it.
Anyway, Pretty Dynamo is still looking good. I absolutely love this interpretation of her outfit.
Featured image: Character designs from Magical Girl Ore.
This is a section from the draft of Rag & Muffin, my next novel to appear after Dead to Rites. This passage may or may not be in the final version in this form:
Only one spot in Godtown did not swell with the cosmic beat nor touch the underside of heaven, but remained dark—a mere part of earth or perhaps of something lower than earth. That was the Talbot Refinery, which stood near the Green Line on the edge of the Elysian-occupied West End.
In the refinery, workers—mostly outcaste marjaras unable to find decent jobs anywhere else—committed the worst blasphemy known in this world: They took the Tuaoi Stones from the mines with which the Elysians had profaned the sacred Vindhya Mountains, and they performed unspeakable deeds to alter those pure crystals into something base and ignoble in order to feed them to the Elysians’ demon-possessed automata.
More powerful than any mundane science, the magic called Runetech had made the Elysians the masters of the world, but the ghosts in their machines hungered for profaned Tuaoi Stones. Thus, in the midst of the holy city, the Talbot Refinery was an outcrop of hell, and it alone could resist the flurry of religious ecstasy and exultation that beset the rest of Godtown every morning.
Just as Meru closed, Talbot’s portal, like a mouth of the underworld, opened to swallow a long string of buses containing the workmen for the morning shift. Like giant jacks dropped from the sky, anti-tank caltrops flanked the road leading to the refinery’s heavily fortified entrance. In a booth at the gate, an underpaid and overworked human babu did his best to check the workers’ and drivers’ papers, which were handed to him—with much shouting and babbling—through half-opened windows along the buses’ sides.
Looming over it all like a colossus and casting its stark and menacing shadow across this scene was an enormous machine, vaguely man-shaped. Thick, bulky armor enclosed it, and it bristled with weapons ranging from conventional autocannons and missile-launchers to rune-powered accelerators and psi-blasters. Every once in a while, one of the intricate symbols carved into the machine’s armor glowed blue or green, letting all below know that it was alive—and that it was watching them. Somewhere deep in its guts, dangling from anti-shock suspensors, was a thing that used to be human.
