Gods & Monsters: Unclean Spirits Is Available Now!

Gods & Monsters: Unclean Spirits now exists in your universe. It has crossed all known boundaries. It has penetrated your reality membrane.

Let’s get this part out of the way right now:

You can buy it at:

Amazon!

B&N!

From your local bookseller using Indiebound!

And quite likely other Word-Merchants around meatspace and within the Internet.

You can read the first chapter here. (io9)

You can read another separate excerpt here. (Tor.com)

The Book

Abaddon said to me, “We’d like you to shepherd a brand new shared world series into existence.”

I said, of course, fuck yeah.

They had that name — Gods & Monsters. The world hit me like a Zeusian thunderbolt out of the ether: I am a sucker for mythology, and thought everyone would get a helluva lot of mileage out of a world where the gods and goddesses, where the monsters and heroes, had all been booted out of their respective spiritual homes and were forced to fuck around here on Earth, their power cut to sub-divine levels but their hunger for power magnified tenfold.

The potential of the series would be, of course, that mythology offers us a wealth of origin material to take and tweak, and future writers in the series wouldn’t be beholden to some 400-page story bible written by me — why invent a whole new pantheon when we can get a lot of common mileage out of the deities and entities that already exist in the world’s stories?

Still, I thought, that’s great for a series but I still need a book out of it — and here I was like, I don’t want it to be about some boring-ass “Everyman.” Some folks can handle that tabula rasa character template well, but for my mileage, I want a character who can do things and who really, really wants something. And so was born the character of Cason Cole, a gone-to-pot MMA fighter whose life and family have been ripped apart by the manipulations of the gods — and now he wants revenge. But is he still being manipulated?

Who is the scarred-face man called the Cicatrix?

Will he fall prey to the Narcissistic adorations of the goddess Aphrodite?

Who is his real father?

Will his wife and son ever be free from the curse that causes them to despise him?

Where is Coyote’s penis?

Is that a unicorn? (Answer: yes, it is a unicorn.)

And the most important question of all:

HOW DO YOU KILL A GOD?

Warning: Contains God-Wangs And Divine Vaginas

It’s not a sexy book, but for reals, I talk a lot about god wangs and goddess hoo-hah.

It in fact contains the following passage, to whet your, erm, appetite:

“I was tamed by it. I was tamed like a temple dog, for it was glorious. Soft and deep. Infinite folds. And when it needed to, it would breathe fire. It could strip flesh from bone with its bitter secretions. Serpents would crawl from her inner channel, serpents with many heads and venom so potent that even a drop of it could slay the Mighty Humbaba.” His voice gets small, speaks with love, lust, reverence: “Her womanhood was beautiful. I bowed before it. I worshiped at it as if it was a fount of sacred water. My tongue, my mouth, my teeth, my fingers, I would sometimes crawl deep within that charnel space and let her give birth—I would be born upon the cold floor of her palace, wet and squalling, and she would pick me up and kiss me and I would be… complete.”

So, there you go.

Speaking Of Wangs…

Pat Kelleher also wrote a sort-of-pseudo-sequel e-novella to Unclean Spirits —

It’s called “Drag Hunt.”

In it, Coyote searches for his lost penis.

Which makes more sense if you read Unclean Spirits.

Kelleher is a helluva writer.

And Finally, The Last And Most Curious Disclaimer

I get some folks who tell me that they like this blog and so they support it by buying my books — which is lovely, thank you! — but here I’d make a note that you buying this book will not necessarily put more money in my pocket. This book was work-for-hire, which is not to say I did not love writing it (I did!) nor to say I don’t want you reading it (I do!), but just in terms of the business arrangement I do not get anything “per sale,” so to speak. Further, I’ve had some folks ask me why I was concentrating more of my marketing fire on the Star Destroyer that is The Blue Blazes (May 28th!) and it is for that very reason — a mercenary capitalist swine decision based on the fact that I cannot devote too much time toward self-promotion lest I get noisy, and so I must choose instead to focus it on the book that puts more actual money in my actual pockets. This is a bit crass, but I figure it’d better to say it instead of giving the impression that I’m not somehow proud of Unclean Spirits, which I am.

And hopefully you urban fantasy / horror / crime fans will find something to love in both books.

Actually, there’s probably some interesting mileage to be had in comparing the two books…

Hm.

Anyway!

Just wanted that said. Hope you dig the book. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.