DUSTBEARER introduction

 

That’s the cover for DUSTBEARER, by Rhiannon Rasmussen-Silverstein. Check the rest of her work out if you like. Good stuff.

DUSTBEARER is a collection of two horror-driven fantasy stories, shared world (just don’t ask me to name it yet.) I’ll be posting some larger excerpts here later on. No, you won’t be quizzed on interminable family relationships or court intrigues or global politics. The women wear plate mail when they go into battle. There are no prophecies. There is no one ring (that’s been done, folks).

The end, however, is written in dust.

Here’s the introduction I scratched out for the release of the kindle edition yesterday.

INTRODUCTION

People are sometimes weirded out by my writing fantasy fiction. Not sure why. Granted, I’m not reading a lot of it, though I did when I was a kid. In the mainstream it’s a completely underrepresented genre (LORD OF THE RINGS and GAME OF THRONES aside). Or we end up disguising our fantasies as horror. That happens a lot too. I suppose that since I don’t talk about the genre a lot online, I’m perceived as being against it. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Think of these as payoff from all those afternoons reading DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS modules and rulebooks and playing ROLEMASTER or MORIA in college instead of doing my close readings of texts. And in all these fantasies, I’m imagining Ray Harryhausen animating armies of the damned and their titanic minions.

I’m no good at influence maps, but here’s some names that you might want to look into further if you dig what’s going on in these pages. Chandler, Waits, DeMatteis, Kirby, Morrison, Gibson, Wolfe, Zelazny, Anthony, Morhaime, Lord British, Harryhausen (so good he has to be namedropped twice), Matheson, Lovecraft (though that’s a complicated subject), Serling, all my third-grade literature reading selections, WIZARDRY, ROGUE, Games Workshop, BLACK TIGER, WARCRAFT, Clavell, Blake and Ann Maxwell for getting me to read anything in the first place.

The whole thing will cost you less than lunch at McDonald’s and will be considerably better for you. Give it a shot.

DUSTBEARER for your Kindle device at Amazon.