Alice’s Adventures in Underland: The Queen of Stilled Hearts #4

Now available at Amazon, Barnes & NobleSmashwords, and Kobo, with Apple not yet up.

Ep #1: blogAmazonB&NKoboSmashwordsGumroadApple, and more.  Free at the blog, Kobo, and Smashwords links; the others will follow.

Ep #2: AmazonB&NSmashwordsGumroadAppleKobo, and more.

Ep #3: AmazonSmashwordsGumroad, Barnes & Noble, Apple, Kobo, and more. AliceBook1Part4_Cover_mini

But Mr. Dodgson did not answer; perhaps, Alice thought, because some feelings were too scattered to be packed neatly together into a single word, and ought to be left as a kind of shambles.

With the invention of a serum that prevents most people infected with the zombie sickness from becoming raving cannibals, Victorian society finds itself in need of more standards:  to separate the infected from the whole, to  control when and how the infected can come into contact with the pure, to establish legal contracts, precedence, employment, and more, with regards to the walking dead.

The very backbone of the British Empire is its standards.

The middle daughter of the Dean of Christ Church in Oxford, Alice Liddell, finds a certain lack of charm in the standards she must follow, with increasing strictness, day after day.  Wild and rebellious, she battles her father’s cold discipline, her mother’s striving to hide her middle-class origins, and the hollow madness of the world around her, in which the teetering Empire desperately pretends that nothing is, in fact, the matter.

Enter Mr. Charles Dodgson:  one of the chaste Dons of Oxford, married to his mathematics.  He charms Alice and her sisters, often taking them on walks and boat rides (chaperoned, of course), and telling them jokes and stories.  He is twenty-four when he first meets them.

And he is dead.

Turned in a tragic accident at Rugby, Charles uses the serum to keep him from the ordinary sort of madness that affects zombies.

But it doesn’t affect the elegant madness of his brain.

And one day, as he sees Alice struggle against the chains that constrict her, chains so similar to his own…

…one of his playful stories becomes something more.

Episode #4:

The story continues.  Mr. Dodgson, under the watchful yet ignorant eye of his friend, Mr. Duckworth, shreds society as a kind of madhouse.  Alice begins to suspect that this Underland lies all around her…

I ask you to kindly take a look at Episode 1 if you’re interested (it’s free, except on Amazon and B&N, because that would be too easy.  [Glares at her distributors]).

Update:  Ah!  In case you’re curious, the picture shows Edith, Lorina (Ina), and Alice, as taken by Charles Dodgson in 1859.

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