Witchy chapbooks for long dark evenings

I realized that after I wrote my last blog post about the newest Alondra DeCourval story that I haven’t written the Alondra collections in a while.

I’ve been writing about elemental witch Alondra DeCourval for decades now. When I started, she was just a little bit older than me. Over time, Alondra has aged more slowly than me, but I’ve been fascinated to watch her change and grow.

In the beginning, Alondra had a lot of anger. She went through a phase where she took risks that she shouldn’t have, a period when she told herself that she didn’t care what happened to herself, as long as she went out swinging. As time has gone on, she’s grown more and more compassionate. I really love that about her.

I’ve put together four three-story collections of her stories, although there are many more yet to be collected. They’re available on Amazon very inexpensively.

They don’t have to be read in order. You can click on the banners to be taken to each of these short books.

Alondra’s Experiments collects the sexiest of Alondra’s adventures. In this book, she walks through Golden Gate Park with a vampire, accidentally combines absinthe and alchemy in Prague, and tries to harvest a valentine for her teacher in Oslo. These stories aren’t shy to take risks.

Alondra’s Investigations contains the first stories where Alondra works as an occult detective. While she is visiting LA, there is a massive earthquake and it seems to have been caused by “The Fatal Book.” “A Curiosity of Shadows” was inspired by my first weekend at the Haunted Mansion Writers Retreat, when I wondered what would frighten ghosts. “Last-Born,” the very first Alondra story, sees her making a painful sacrifice to help ghosts take their revenge in New Orleans.

Alondra’s Adventures is the third novella-length chapbook of The Alondra Stories.  These lean more heavily into horror, although “The Fox and the Foreigner” was long-listed for the British Science Fiction Association Award. “Sakura Time” was inspired by Japanese movies like Ring and Pulse. “The Drowning City,” about a centuries-long vendetta in Venice, was republished in one of the Best New Horror anthologies.

Alondra’s Exploits, the most recent collection asks, “When humans encounter the supernatural, who are the monsters?” Alondra gets called in to the California Academy of Sciences to figure out what is attacking the scientists. She travels to Michigan’s Mackinaw Island to put an end to a chain of murderous events. Finally, something has awakened beneath the Golden Gate Bridge…and it is hungry.

I’ve loved writing these stories. I hope you’ll enjoy reading them.