Fairy Tale by AK Nevermore
AK Nevermore’s Fairy Tale is a suspenseful enchanting tale that gives us a fairy tale in a bleak postmodern urban setting.
Charlie Peel is having a rough time since she has been dumped and lost her job. She is not interested in the claims from the mysterious Nikodem “Nikos” Wisniewski who believes that she fits his grandmother's psychic visions of a wila, or a fairy. Nikos abducts Charlie and entices her to be his fiancee despite their growing attachment towards each other and her curiosity wondering whether his claims of her being a fairy are true.
This short novel favors dark energy and atmosphere over fantastic moments. It creates a strange but effective amalgam of crime thriller and dark fantasy.
The book starts out gritty and harsh like a typical dark urban contemporary thriller featuring two characters at their most frustrated and vulnerable. Charlie is feeling disenchanted by her lost job and break up. She is a woman ready to explode. Nikos tries to do his assignment and cover his tracks. He is aware of his family’s powerful legacy breathing down on him and that he has to live up to their expectations.
Nikos’ family’s control over his actions and Charlie’s fierce despair foreshadow the eventual violence. In fact when Nikos takes Charlie, it reads like a psychological thriller about a stalker or serial killer taking his victim to a remote location. His plan of her posing as his fiancee while Charlie cowers because he has the decapitated head of his previous hunting assignment has a dark comic edge to it.
The fantasy aspects begin when Nikos recognizes Charlie’s fairy lineage through psychic impressions. They are somewhat subdued since we don’t actually see Charlie use magic or even fully believe that she is a fairy. She just knows that she’s in a Gothic situation surrounded by a potentially dangerous family with unspoken powers, both natural and supernatural. She knows that she has to play their game for now to survive.
But within Charlie lies the unspoken possibility that if she is a wila, then the Wisniewskis are permitting someone made of potent and dangerous magic, a dour outlook on life, and anger at the world including at the man and family holding her against her will into their lives. They could be turning her into the very demon that they are afraid of.
The first story creates suspense by atmosphere. The second could potentially destroy that atmosphere when Charlie discovers the powers that have been lurking inside her and takes it out on her treacherous captors and the desolate world surrounding her.
The Perfect Bitch (The Perfect Fate Book 3) by Tom Kane
Tom Kane’s book, The Perfect Bitch is a Gothic Historical Paranormal Horror about a movie star whose obsession with fame, youth, and beauty becomes a horror.
Lovella Benjamin is a movie star from the 1930’s-40’s known for her glamor and difficult reputation, both of which earn her the moniker “The Perfect Bitch.” As she ages, she is anxious about her fading career and rivals. Her ambition reached the attention of a stranger, David Garland who has an enticing offer for her.
This book combines early Gothic works like Faust and The Picture of Dorian Gray with the remote allure of Old Hollywood. While the horror elements are eerie, the majority of the book is a character study of Lovella. Her personality including arrogance, fears, and insecurities is fully displayed.
When we first meet Lovella, she is 17 and already aware of how attractive she is and how she can control besotted men with just a look and a hair flip. However, what they don’t realize is that Bella is no ingenue. She is cunning, brilliant, and ruthless. It is quickly shown in the first pages when she turns the casting couch on its head in front of an associate producer. She reveals that she can not only play the Hollywood Shuffle but succeed at it too.
Lovella is a perfect actress because she is willing to play the part on and off the screen. She subjects herself to painful treatments, excessive beauty care regiments, diets, diction lessons, and especially a fake biographical profile to hide who she really is. It’s routine for all actresses but for an actress who is already receptive to deceit and manipulation, it confirms that she’s in the right place. Like other notorious bad girls in the past like
Vanity Fair’s Becky Sharp, she doesn’t defy the society around her, she embodies the society around her. She is the worst qualities of Hollywood wrapped up in human form.
Lovella’s complicated journey is probably why the book focuses more on her than the creepy paranormal stuff that happens to her. She is an eerie forceful presence of her own that can challenge any demon, sorcerer, or otherworldly being. She blackmails a former associate when he wants to destroy evidence implicating her. She steals close ups and spotlights from a rival. She starts a whispering campaign against an actor that she is attracted to when told that his presence is interfering with her popularity. She schemes to end the career of a young upstart. She uses a romance for publicity then strings her lover along for years afterwards.
Lovella’s dominance has an almost supernatural aura on its own that goes beyond earthly means. She has an almost clairvoyant sense and potent energy that knows when and how to wound an adversary while keeping her career, beauty, and fame intact. She herself is sometimes the demonic presence in her book.
When supernatural events start to happen. It’s not surprising. Instead it’s inevitable. Lovella is not so much being drawn in by circumstances that she can’t explain and is frightened of but welcomed by a presence that understands her and thinks of her as one of their own. The dark twisted otherworldly happenings are reflections of her own dark, twisted, and human soul.
Our Own Authors by Brian Baleno (coming soon)
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