Rise of the Nephilim
A
Blackmoore Prequel
by
Marcus James
Date of Publication:
July 24th 2017
Publisher: Candiano
Books
Cover Artist: Ransom
Graphics
Genre: Erotic PNR/Gothic Horror
Tagline:
Sex, witchcraft, and rock and roll on the
Sunset Strip
The
Gothic and the Erotic: Two Sides of the Same Coin (part 2)
Gothic literature has
a special place in my heart, a place filled with decaying houses with crumbling
walls, trees that are always naked of leaves, or canopied and dripping with
Spanish moss. It’s ghosts, vampires, and witches. It’s obsession, and
unwillingness to let go of the dead, and a pervasive sense of foreboding that
you just can’t shake.
Gothic horror and
general Gothic literature share all of these elements. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, The Secret History, A Density
of Souls, The Snow Garden, The Client, and The Virgin Suicides are all great examples of pedestrian Gothic
literature; lacking in little to none supernatural elements but are Gothic
nonetheless.
Gothic horror is most
often what we think of when we think of “gothic”. We think Dracula, Frankenstein,
the works of Poe, Joyce Carol Oats, Anne Rice and so on; giving us ghosts, monsters,
twisted desires etc. All of it weaving into something darkly seductive and
decadent in its use of language and description.
Gothic literature lives
in the space of grief. Grief is a powerful thing, the constant sense of loss
and a refusal to give up the ghost. Whether that ghost is metaphoric or
literal. It is a bleakness and a pain that darkness life and keeps the dead
from moving on.
I like writing about
grief. I like the way it obsesses and yearns, and can push one into forbidden
thoughts and deeds. It is not always the grief of losing someone to death, it
can be grief over the loss of love-of innocence-the loss of everything you ever
thought you believed in. It explores dark, deep emotions that most of us think
but do not dare share aloud.
Jane Eyre is an example of a piece of Gothic
literature that takes us to the unforgiving and isolating landscape of the moors,
and deftly explores the dark obsession of love and loss.
Whether about terrors of the night or the
dark cravings of our own desires, Gothic horror and Gothic realism share one
thing; the erotic.
All of these books
explore sexuality and sensuality, and that what makes them so endearing and so
powerful. Lust, desire, obsession, vengeance, fear, and quiet rage. Some explore
eroticism more strongly than others, but it is there in every piece; along with
the old houses and broken sidewalks.
My novels explore eroticism and love to its
fullest. I believe in taking my readers every step of the way on the journey of
my characters. What’s the point of getting you so invested in the character's
wants, needs, and desires, if in the end, all I’m going to do is fade to black?
I got my publishing
start writing erotica for a dozen brilliant anthologies for Alyson Books (no
longer around, but for decades they were the Knopf/Random House of LGBT publishing)
and I wrote some pretty experimental pieces that to this day I can’t believe
ended up in anthologies of sex. Stories that were about addiction to love and
attention, stories about ghosts and witches, even a story about two boys who
kill their parents in the south and run away in the end.
These were Gothic and
erotic, and went all the way. There is a difference between pornography and
erotica. In pornography, the story is for the sake of the sex. Often there
isn’t really much to the story itself, but with erotica, it’s all about sex for
the sake of the story. The sex scene has to be organic to the plot, it has to
take you to the brink of what the characters are going through, and it has to
stir emotion in the reader. In PNR I find this extremely effective as a
vehicle, because at the heart of PNR is the R.
I personally think
there is no “too little or too much” sex in a story. As long as it is organic
and makes sense to the plot and isn’t just thrown in there to be shocking or daring.
In all of my novels there is sex. In my latest, Rise of the Nephilim-which follows my character Kathryn Blackmoore
from my witch series The Blackmoore
Legacy, as a young woman in 1980’s LA-there is a lot of sex. It is
purposely an erotic paranormal romance/Gothic horror, and I had a lot of fun
writing it. Usually I have one or two sex scenes, but with this book, I got to
explore the sexuality of a young woman in a time when the women’s liberation
movement was still a relatively new concept.
She’s a powerful witch from a powerful and
troubled family, and in her future she will be the matriarch of the Blackmoore
family of witches, and this genre was a great way to explore the person she was
before she became a wife, widower, and mother to the main character in the
Blackmoore series.
I think to embrace
the Gothic we have to embrace the erotic in all of its nuances, and not runaway
from it or look down on it or see it as less than “quality” literature. It is intrinsic
to what makes Gothic fiction so fantastic, just as intrinsic as all of the
other elements, and it is worth being celebrated. As with all PNR, the Nephilim
novellas have a HEA, no matter how temporary that HEA is in the long run.
In Rise of the Nephilim, our love interest
(versus the two lust interests) Sheffield Burges, gets on his metaphoric white
horse to come ‘rescue' the woman he loves and be the man that she needs him to
be, and in the concluding book, Fall of
the Nephilim, we will see Kathryn and Sheffield reconnect after an eight
year separation, and work through all of the crap they have to work through to
be whole again; with the added struggle of the dark and complicated reality of
Kathryn Blackmoore's world.
These things excite
me and I think that PNR-when blended with Gothic horror-gets to go down roads general
PNR doesn’t get to go down. With the gothic, we can take a romance novel and go
into some pretty dark and scary places thick with lush description and history,
and we can freely explore the darkness in all characters, including our heroes.
It allows us to safely explore the darker side of love and desire and to do so
with complete abandon and emotional investment. How could anyone not enjoy
that?
BLURB
LOS ANGELES, summer of 1987.
Kathryn Blackmoore, the 26 year old heir to
Blackmoore World Corp. and the future matriarch of the Blackmoore dynasty of
witches has fled the haunted old monied neighborhood of South Hill in
Bellingham, Washington looking to trade in a century of rumors, superstition,
and her own heartache for the sun, sex, and music of the Sunset Strip.
Taking up residence in the famed and decaying
Chateau Marmont hotel, Kathryn quickly finds herself in an erotic and thrilling
journey into the world of Niiq, Arish, and Kuri; members of the band Nephilim,
who seem to have the women of the Strip enthralled by their dark and sensuous
sound. When bodies begin to turn up all over town and a mysterious and haunting
figure fixates on Kathryn, she quickly learns that you can never escape your
destiny.
RISE OF THE NEPHILIM is the first of a
two part erotic paranormal romance/thriller revealing the beginnings of one of
the most captivating characters in The Blackmoore Legacy series. It is a
standalone prequel of eroticism, romance, and suspense.
Excerpt:
The
library was quiet with the exception of the short and humming-to-herself
library assistant stacking the books left out or returned through-out the day.
The girl was a junior; she was sure of it. She had never talked to her; they
had never orbited the same solar system in the day-to-day endless galaxy of
Mariner High School, but that didn’t matter.
She could
still reach inside the girl’s mind whenever she wanted to, and explore
everything she kept hidden from the rest of the world. She could travel the fleshy
terrain of the girl’s brain and see her hopes and dreams, her fears, her loves,
and her longings.
She was
able to pick out that her name was Tammy. She was a studious girl with dirty
blonde curls that hung to her breasts, her skin milk-white and soft, her face
delicate and scattered with a dusting of freckles across the bridge of her
small nose. Her brown eyes were golden and looked over the spine of each book,
scanning their titles and looking up to each aisle to see where they belonged.
Kathryn
Blackmoore stood from the table where she had been discussing after graduation
party plans with her best friend Lila Sifuentes and with her boyfriend
Sheffield Burges, excited to finally walk and receive their diplomas and be
done with this place forever.
She was
tall – five feet and nine inches. Her lean body was dressed in a pink-and-white
pin-striped collared shirt, the sleeves rolled up to her elbows, the collar
popped and buttoned only to her full breasts.
A
three-tiered pearl necklace glistened in the bright white fluorescents
overhead, and her thick shoulder-length feathered mane was a rich auburn that
seemed to glow around her like a halo.
She
gathered her books and began to make her way to the doors to begin the walk
through campus back to her home. Her long legs were encased in a khaki,
knee-length Ralph Lauren skirt with a slit up the left thigh and a tasseled and
thin brown leather belt was fastened loosely around her waist and rested on her
hipbones. Kathryn looked at her watch; it was 9:00 p.m. They had been put in
charge of the after-party by the entire student body – at least by the Golden
Gods, as the popular kids were called – and it was their job to deliver.
Somehow
by some cruel joke perpetrated by the universe, Kathryn had somehow become one
of them. That was a first for her family, and it was no surprise to her that
this ascension in the school’s hierarchy was achieved by her relationship with
Sheffield. He was one of the kindest and most popular guys at their elitist
school, and was a rock star on the Soccer field. It was the school’s claim to
greatness and claim to fame. Other schools had football, but Mariner was known
throughout the country for their school’s soccer team. In the eighteen years of
its existence – as long she had been alive – Mariner was a crowning achievement
and had only ever lost three games. Families from the country over, who dreamed
of soccer field futures for their children chose Mariner – a public high school
– over the best sports-driven private schools.
Mariner
was a dynasty of Bellingham Washington, and the rite of passage for the
exclusive children of South Hill, with their centuries-old Victorian, Tudor,
Colonial, and Craftsman mansions that stood on large plots of land between
treacherous and almost guard-like evergreens on every street, and sidewalks
lined with monstrous oaks and maples. Homes filled with inhabitants of both the
living and the dead.
Then
there werethe Edgemoore kids. Nouveau riche. Most of them were native
Californians whose parents moved here in a great rush for cheap land when
California’s real estate began to climb higher and higher, and for the chance
to get their kid on the Mariner soccer team.
Here, on
the cliffs on the other side of Bellingham Bay, and staring back at the old
genteel mansions, were the castle-like and gaudy estates of Edgemoore.
These
kids had no respect for the history that still stood in the city, and the
almost haunted charm of Fairhaven, that filled the space along the water
between these two wealthy neighborhoods. Fairhaven was the last town to merge
with the county of Whatcom in 1903, finally forming the greater city of
Bellingham. For the city, and everyone in it, there was a difference between
the South Hill neighborhood and the rest of Bellingham itself, as if it were
still its own town.
Connecting
the south to the north of Bellingham was the campus of Fairhaven University,
which in the 1890s had been the Washington State Normal School. Fairhaven
University was carved through the trees and made up of tall, red-orange brick
buildings and concrete bridges overpaved pathways in between the green. The
city was not unlike Bram Stoker’s description of Transylvania: a place wild and
filled with spirits, and fiercer things that lived in the mouth of the
Carpathian Mountains that surrounded it.
The city
was surrounded by cliffs and an endless army of evergreens.
Interstate
5 snaked through all of this above the city, so that every exit dipped down
into it. Kathryn had grown up here, had been born here, into South Hill’s
superstition and paranoia and never-ending fears.
South
Hill was filled with the descendants of the founding families, and the majority
had worshiped at The Cathedral of the Sacred Heart.
The white
wood church with its gorgeous and detailed mammoth windows of stained glass was
crowned with a single black-slated roof and spire.
The first
time Kathryn had ever used her witchcraft against another was the priest who
had tried to take advantage of her when she was twelve. It had felt
invigorating to watch his body convulse and the blood begin to slip out of his
mouth, eyes, and nose – even his ears.
When he
had hit the floor, his brain fried, she had screamed and run out of the office
as soon as one of the nuns and another priest – Father
Malady –
opened the door, covering her tear-stained face.
It didn’t
help anything when she told them what he had been attempting to do when the
aneurism hit. She could hear the headmaster’s thoughts, as well as the two nuns
and Father Malady, who had sat with his arms folded, his angular and almost
rat-like face with his beady green eyes looking at her with a smug grin. They
knew she had somehow caused it. She was a Blackmoore, after all; she was a
witch and she had used her charms to seduce the priest. To bewitch him and
befuddle him and make him lose all of his sense and self-control. She had made
him weak on purpose so that she could kill him – to sacrifice him to Satan and
make another hit in their diabolical war with the Church.
She had
said nothing. She wanted to leave and go to Fairhaven Middle School. She was in
her last year of junior high and she didn’t
want to
be in this place any longer, with ruler hits and other obscene punishments.
They were more than happy to get her out. Her father,
Trevor
Mayland, had been the one to insist she go to Catholic School.
He feared
the Blackmoore name as much as anyone else, regardless of the fact that he had
married her mother, Annaline Blackmoore in 1961.
He had
loved her so much that he had wanted to save Annaline from what he saw as the
Blackmoore curse. He thought that she would be far from the devil’s reach if he
could marry her and make an honest woman out of her. A God-fearing woman who
would go to mass every
Sunday
and keep far from her family’s other practice, aside from Blackmoore World
Corp. – a multi-billion-dollar-a-year international company which handled
almost all the shipments of goods, most legal and some more questionable, of
the entire world – was running the Church of Light, the Spiritualist church
that her great-grandmother Aria had started in 1898, where she would commune
with the dead, read palm, tarot cards, and tea leaves.
It was a
place where for a hefty sum, Aria could be hired to work her witchcraft for
others, no matter the intention. The Church of Light was then run by Aria’s
daughter Fiona, and now her daughter Mabel, her mother’s older sister. Annaline
had been too adventurous for that anyways, and so Trevor’s plan meant nothing
one way or the other, as Annaline was too much of a wild child, concerned with
music festivals and poets and drinking while smoking pot and cigarettes.
This fact
did not stop Trevor Mayland from worrying about “his girls,” as he called his
wife and daughter, and sending Kathryn to boarding school, only a few blocks
from her actual home, to only visit on the weekends, was extremely easy for him.
Yes, she
had had enough at that point, and the death of the priest put a smile on her
face – a smile she had to fight back when they almost hesitantly told her that
she was finished and would be going back home.
They were
witches; this was true, and Father Malady had known this. A man of forty-seven,
straight from Ireland – in Kilcommon,County Mayo – where the Blackmoores had
originated from, and where they still lived inside the great limestone citadel
known as Blackmoore Hall on the shores of Broadhaven Bay.
Everyone
in that part of Ireland knew of the Blackmoores. They believed them to be a
family who grew into their wealth because of a pact with the devil, and those
who knew them gained fortune or befell ruin simply for knowing them.
During
the witch hunts her ancestors had fled the Black Moor and built a rustic
cottage with a thatched roof along the cruel and wild sea, in hiding from both
the evils of Christian men and the even greater and ancient evil that had
tormented the clan of the Black Moor for centuries before finally escaping. He
was a dark and bloodthirsty God who had tried to make slaves of the clan and
had forced them to sacrifice the weak and the innocent to his altar.
They had
finally escaped him, turning their back on him and refusing to write his name
down or speak it from their lips. This went on for two hundred years, until all
those who had known him had died, and he had grown weak from being forgotten.
They left the moor in the year 1145 and journeyed northwest, as far from the
wood and that deity as possible. They were secluded and far from wealthy, and
then suddenly in 1845, they began to buy up nearly thirteen thousand acres of
land and built a great, almost castle-like home. They were all certain that the
family was finally reaping their rewards for the trade of their souls.
This had
never been the case. The reason for the wealth was far more mundane; Katy
Blackmoore of New Orleans – where the family
had moved
to in the 1780s – denounced the family and the many evils that served the Dark God
of the Wood who wished to wipe out the Blackmoores, and left for Spain. She
returned almost a year later married to Spanish royalty, and bequeathed a
fortune enough for a kingdom to her father Tristan, her brother Nicholas, and
her grandparents Sarafeene and Malachey, in exchange for being left alone by
them so that she could live a normal life.
She had
lost her mother to her family and their Legacy – the name of their great curse
– and she was certain that if she separated herself from her family and lived a
good Christian life, never summoning her witchcraft, then she would not lose
her husband, and her children would never suffer the loss of a parent, or the
feeling of knowing who you were and what you were would end up killing the one
you loved.
The Blackmoores
had agreed and with that money, they made the family flourish. First in New
Orleans and Ireland, and then later, the family moved west and north, and all
points in between. Spreading out all across the United States, England, France,
Italy, and Ireland, in vesting in industry and especially shipping; and
acquiring and building fleets upon fleets of ships, until there was no one to
rival them.
By the
time the family had arrived in Fairhaven to begin building their empire in the
“Gateway of Alaska,” as it had been known, the residents of the city were
openly hostile – being fueled by the legends and superstitions of immigrant
priests and servants who whispered about the dangerous and devilish Blackmoores
of Kilcommon and their mission to take over the Christian world and hand it to
the devil and his fallen angels, wrapped with a big bloodstained bow.
It was
shit, but superstition is slow to die, and even in 1979, the people of South
Hill still feared the Blackmoore name and what it meant if you talked to them.
Kathryn had suffered that for so long, and for the longest time, Lila Sifuentes
– the only Latina in the school –had been her only friend.
Her
father had always loved Kathryn, but up until his death a week after the
incident – due to the sudden brain tumor that claimed the lives of those who
have unprotected sex with a Blackmoore – he had always been slightly wary of
her, as if he could see the curse deep under her veins.
Unprotected
sex with a Blackmoore always seemed to kill seven to twelve years later, and
always of a severe seizure and hemorrhage caused by the tumor. Blood pooled
from the nose, mouth, and other parts of the face, and the body would convulse.
They would be biting their tongues so hard that often they bit the tip off
completely. Every witch in her family always hoped and often believed that they
would be the Blackmoore to survive the curse, that their lover would be strong
enough to beat it back.
They
always died, and her father had been no different.
Kathryn
had been dangerously beautiful all her life, with a statuesque body and icy
eyes – the palest of blues – and soft olive skin with an
always-perfectly-feathered auburn mane lik ealion, and the latest fashions
straight out of Vogueclothing her. She had a husky whiskey voice, much like the
actress Kim Novak. She had loved Bell, Book, and Candle, so the comparison was
flattering; besides, she thought Kim Novak was a magnificent and stunning
creature.
Author Info
Marcus James is the author of
five novels and has contributed to several anthologies with Alyson Books and
has been a contributing writer for Seattle Gay News. He lives in Seattle with
his husband and Staffordshire terrier. He is 32 years old.
Author Links:
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