The Ouroboros Lock

by Mark William Chase

Sorcery, time travel, murder, and Fate... These three time-twisting tales will send you tumbling from one diabolical time-loop to another. "Before his disappearance, the mad locksmith Avery Guissant completed his masterpiece—an inscrutable clockwork mechanism known only as the Ouroboros Lock. Said to open the very gates of time itself, the lock has become the most coveted occult artifact in the City of Dreadful Night. Now, three men seek to claim its power in a bloody feud. One struggles to recover his stolen heirloom, another kills to serve his lord’s avarice whim, and a third labors to master the lock’s time-twisting magic." Three tales, intertwined through time and space. Three schemes, murderous and diabolical. Three souls, locked in conflict and damned by the Fates, their doom ordained by the Ouroboros Lock.

Genres: Horror

87 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 31, 2018

About the author

Mark William Chase lives near Indianapolis with his wife and the occasional foster kid. There he spends most of his free time reading science fiction and fantasy, keeping up with the latest news in science and technology, and writing the kinds of stories he most enjoys reading. At his day job, he works as a software architect developing cloud-based financial and banking applications.

He is an avid connoisseur of the steampunk aesthetic and has adorned his home office with curious devices and clockwork contrivances collected both from afar and crafted by his own hand. He can occasionally be found attending science fiction conventions in his ever-accumulating steampunk attire.

Reviews

[Join the Penguin Resistance! · Rating 5 out of 5]

An enormously engaging Victorian-era Steampunkish Urban Fantasy presented as a framework of three linked tales, this collection is eminently readable and yet reminds me of the best classic Gothic literature in its very compelling resonances.

[Roxanne Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Surely Mark William Chase, by his writing style, must be the love child of Stephen King and Edgar Allen Poe. In this amazing tale of greed, revenge and averice, we follow a clockwork type mechanism with the ability to send one through time and space and its effect it has on those who try to utilize it for their own purposes.
Perhaps it is a cautionary tale reminding us that some things are best not tampered with and the dark arts are indeed dark, possibly darker than we should touch upon.
A fascinating read that I guarantee will make you think twice before venturing where we are not meant to go.
I was given this book for unbiased review.