Jay Starre offers up a raunchy, non-stop feast of lusty medieval adventures in his latest book. Erotic Tales of the Knights Templar contains 20 tales of nasty knights, as they battle and debauch their way through the Latin Kingdom of the 13th century Holy Land - entwined with a back story of bondage, respect, discipline and servitude. Sizzling with hot gay eroticism.
On location in Scotland for a film shoot, stuntwoman Cat Terril is waiting to film an action scene when she takes a stroll through the ancient castle that is their set. Then she meets an old man in black robes who gives her a set of keys and directs her to "follow your heart." Thinking it is a harmless prank designed by fellow stuntmen, Cat follows the old man?s direction to a locked door around which swirls a strange, lavender mist. Using the set of keys, she opens the door, steps into the mist and falls, literally, into a frigid lake in thirteenth century Scotland. There was no ?harmless prank? involved. Cat is in desperate peril, finding herself suddenly the hostage of vicious, brutal clan leader, Calum Mackay. To obtain clemency from the Scottish king, the renegade Mackay must give his daughter, Brianna, to Englishman Roderic de Montwain in marriage. Brianna, however, in love with another, has run away. And Cat bears a striking resemblance to Mackay?s absent daughter. It is unbelievable enough to find herself in medieval Scotland. It is beyond comprehension to find herself abruptly married to a stranger. A stranger, moreover, who unlocks a passion and sensuality within her Cat never suspected she harbored. And Roderic, who has vowed to never lose his heart, finds himself falling for the mysterious, flame-haired bride he has taken to his bed. A bride some say is mad and others claim is an imposter.
The past through tomorrow are boldly imagined and reinvented in the twenty-five stories collected in this showcase anthology. Many of the field's finest practitioners are represented here, along with stories from promising newcomers, including: William Barton * Rob Chilson * Tony Daniel * Cory Doctorow * Jim Grimsley * Gwyneth Jones * Chris Lawson * Ian McDonald * Robert Reed * William Browning Spencer * Allen Steele * Michael Swanwick * Howard Waldrop * Cherry Wilder * Liz Williams A useful list of honorable mentions and Dozois's insightful summation of the year in sf round out this anthology, making it indispensable for anyone interested in SF today.
An old woman enters into a fantastical world of dreams and nightmares in this surrealist classic admired by Björk and Luis Buñuel. Leonora Carrington, painter, playwright, and novelist, was a surrealist trickster par excellence, and The Hearing Trumpet is the witty, celebratory key to her anarchic and allusive body of work. The novel begins in the bourgeois comfort of a residential corner of a Mexican city and ends with a man-made apocalypse that promises to usher in the earth’s rebirth. In between we are swept off to a most curious old-age home run by a self-improvement cult and drawn several centuries back in time with a cross-dressing Abbess who is on a quest to restore the Holy Grail to its rightful owner, the Goddess Venus. Guiding us is one of the most unexpected heroines in twentieth-century literature, a nonagenarian vegetarian named Marian Leatherby, who, as Olga Tokarczuk writes in her afterword, is “hard of hearing” but “full of life.”
Uses the principles of sacred geometry, archaeological evidence, and Native American legend to discover the site of a secret Templar settlement in Nova Scotia • Offers evidence that Scottish prince Henry Sinclair not only sailed to the New World 100 years before Columbus, but that he also established a refuge there for the Templars fleeing persecution • Shows that the Grail, the holy bloodline connecting the House of David to the Merovingian dynasty through Jesus and Mary Magdalene, was hidden in the New World In 1398, almost 100 years before Columbus arrived in the New World, the Scottish prince Henry Sinclair, Earl of Orkney, sailed to what is today Nova Scotia, where his presence was recorded by Micmac Indian legends about Glooskap. This was the same Prince Henry Sinclair who offered refuge to the Knights Templar fleeing the persecution unleashed against the order by French king Philip the Fair at the beginning of the 14th century. With evidence from archaeological sites, indigenous legend, and sacred geometry handed down by the Templar order to the Freemasons, author William F. Mann has now rediscovered the site of the settlement established by Sinclair and his Templar followers in the New World. Here they found a safe refuge for the Grail--the holy bloodline connecting the House of David to the Merovingian Dynasty through the descendants of Jesus and Mary Magdalene--until the British exiled all the Acadians in 1755.
To honor his oath, he’ll offer a Fae lord his soul… Centuries ago, Lord Uthe was a Templar Knight. Now he serves on the current day Vampire Council. Despite the volatile and highly sexual nature of the vampire world, he honors the spirit of the Rule. That effort becomes far more difficult when he catches the attention of the Fae Lord Keldwyn, liaison between the Council and Fae Court. Keldwyn challenges Uthe’s emotional isolation and dominant nature. When a quest from Uthe’s past requires Keldwyn’s help to protect both their worlds, Uthe will have to decide whether the Fae male is a gift from God to be cherished and trusted, or a curse that will make Uthe fail the Order he promised to serve all his life.
Because they are so often told as news, contemporary legends force us to reevaluate life as we know it. They confront us with macabre, fantastic, horrific, or hilarious characters and events that seem to come straight out of myths and folktales, but are presented as present day events. The difficulty is that it is not at all easy to decide whether these often disturbing stories should be treated as reliable or dismissed as fantasy. The legends explored in this book are some of the most bizarre, gruesome, and politically sensitive stories in the contemporary legend canon. At any moment a body may be invaded by noxious creatures, deliberately infected with deadly disease, or raided to provide donor organs for sick foreigners. These are "winter's tales," the stuff of nightmares. In this book Gillian Bennett traces the cultural history of six legends, well-known in Europe and America from medieval times to the present day. Appearing in broadsides, ballads, myths, ancient and modern legends, novels, plays, films, television shows, and stories told in the oral tradition, these legends are not just silly tales which can be dismissed as trivial and untrue. They reveal much about the concerns and fears of everyday life and demonstrate the limits of knowledge and power in the modern world.
