AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!
I mean…
I would like to announce that My new gothic space opera novel, House of Masks, is live on Kickstarter.
If you love modern gothic fiction with a science fiction twist (and have feeling a bit like you might want to set a few things on fire lately), please click the button to take a look.
Two planets. One Secret. No mercy.
The past is never truly buried. Not even on another world.
The planet Thomàon was meant to be a paradise—a dazzling jewel of civilization among the stars. For centuries, its people have lived in decadence in the Silver City, where the elite gather to celebrate each Season in masked splendor. But beneath the city’s glittering façade, secrets fester. The immortality-granting elixir that sustains the ruling class is running out. The powers behind the masks are faltering. And the ghosts of old Earth are beginning to stir.
When Warden Marks Lemure returns to the city carrying a final, desperate cargo, he unknowingly sets in motion a chain of betrayals that will unravel Thomàon’s fragile peace. His daughter, Ammaline, a gifted singer invited to perform at the legendary Opéra du Mendicant, is thrust into a dangerous world of intrigue, where every mask hides an agenda, and every whispered promise conceals a knife. As revolution looms and the foundations of power begin to shake, old alliances will be tested, new enemies will rise, and the fate of an entire world may rest on those willing to unmask the truth—before it’s too late.
For fans of gothic space opera, dystopian intrigue, and high-stakes court drama, House of Masks is a mesmerizing tale of power, deception, and the haunted legacy of a world on the brink.
It was a time that had come untethered from time itself, a time which reflected a hundred other times that had come before it, and a thousand more that would surely come after. It was a place of such deception that one’s lies revealed one’s secrets more than they hid them, and of such decadence as to corrupt one’s very flesh, or to refine it—to immortality.
We called it Thomàon, a blue jewel of a world amongst the diamond stars of the black velvet night. We did not recall the origin of the name. In fact, so much time had passed since we had contact with the other gems of the sky that we had all but forgotten that they existed. We told tales of other worlds as though they were fantasies or myths. And every year we gathered together for the Great Masquerade in the Silver City, and sealed ourselves within the Great Dome, while storms and madness reigned without.
Now the Great Masquerade has come to an end, the Masks are removed, all has been revealed—and all lies in ruins.
But once Thomàon was a paradise.
Its fields were green, its oceans blue. Across the world rose the elegant cities of the Grillons, fantastic whimsies of architecture, miraculously created by a savage, stupid, and maddened race. Their cousin race the Scarabées rooted through the earth, bringing forth such minerals as we desired: shining metals, iron, corundum, diamonds, and that most precious material of them all: the golden elixir, which granted immortality. Other creatures may have existed, but we did not much notice them. Machines worked the fields, and brought in the harvests, and carried us across the waves to our private islands, our far castles, our laboratories, our fortresses.
On the world of Thomàon lay but a single great city of humankind, the Silver City. The Silver City could hold at the height of the Season the entire human population of Thomàon, that is, a million human inhabitants. And in the Silver City there was a single great castle, the Castle of the Silver Spire, home of a hundred fountains, reflecting pools, and towers, and a thousand balconies. At the heart of the castle was the Silver Spire itself, an enormous, graceful tower, high enough to bathe itself in the clouds during any weather. It was the only piece of the Silver City which protruded from the Great Dome when it was sealed, and whose tip held such devices as to inform the Silver City when the Season had finished and it was time for our revelries to come to an end.
Good luck! This looks amazing!
THANK YOU!!!!