A rotisserie of knifeplay

I never thought of myself as a Halloween girl, not like some Halloween folks I know, but I have always been into ghost stories and uncanny magic. Now six of my stories on those topics are collected in The Season, which comes out October 1.

(But if you’re already in a Halloween mood, you can read it now via Smashwords presale. There’s a special discount offer available with the presale, too.)

This post serves as a brief content recap/warning/recommendation of what it includes.

My fascination with ghosts, literal or more figurative, has always been a fascination with grief and loss (and it’s taken me all the way to Best Women’s Erotica of the Year). And then I’m, well–you may have noticed–kind of damn kinky. Danger and sex, pain and sex, these are hot to explore, especially in written fantasies. Fierce desperation and passion, stories that can be cathartic as well as arousing. Power that’s barely under control or completely out of control. Eros and Thanatos go hand in hand, or maybe it’s that in the face of death, eroticism is life-affirming defiance. Sometimes both are true at once.

So the stories in The Season contain all of that.

By now you’re probably wondering what this post title is about! It’s because, if “kinky is using a feather, perverted is using the whole chicken,” I would say this collection contains some downy tufts of cannibalism, and a rotisserie of knifeplay.

It also has bondage for a magical reason and willing power exchanges.

Pairings are M/M, F/M (the majority), and F/F/M. (If you’re interested in gothic F/F, my Poe retelling, “The Passion of Her Sleep,” is currently available in the Mystique anthology from Aurelia Leo and will be collected in the Urchronia omnibus out January 2022.)

Not all the stories in The Season have happy endings, though I’d describe most as bittersweet: something lost, something salvaged. That’s my favorite ending to a horror story, and some of these pieces definitely count as horror, not just dark or kinky fantasy. There is no onscreen death but several deaths happen before or after the story (not a spoiler: there are ghost stories after all!). There are established relationships and new ones. There’s romance, though not the kind you’d find on the Hallmark Channel, unless it’s changed a lot since I last flipped past it.

Also I just typed “kind” in the previous sentence as “kink,” which is the perfect Freudian slip.

If this sounds like your kind of thing/kink of thing, I hope you enjoy it to the very last crimson drop.