Press Kit for August’s Gardens:
Back Cover Text:
Morrigan is beyond death, trapped in a hellish nightmare from which only the Artist can save her. The Fiend is behind enemy lines learning to reap what he has sown. The Artist reaches deep into his past to find a reason for the strange woman he now must rescue from the vile Dark Man. The Winged Man is forced to wait while all of the elements he needs to start a war with hell itself fall into place. Will he fight alone or will his shattered family unite with him?
Excerpt:
“Wide green eyes sparkle with cold tears. Filth and blood cover the skin around them. The once beautiful but now sallow face they belong to grinds against thick gore. A sigh escapes past the bleeding cracks on Morrigan’s dry lips and her features relax. Seconds later, she screams and spit slithers out of her mouth to collect with the excretions and slime surrounding her.
As the brutal pain subsides for a moment, Morrigan feels as if she’s dancing in a ballroom with a small child in her arms. The sensation is very real and for the briefest of moments, Morrigan is away from this awful place with its endless swelling blackness. The terrible agony of her death immediately follows her vision of the ballroom, as it always does. She lies there weaving in and out of bliss and horror in a prison of which she is unaware. She has no concept of time. Day and night do not exist for her. She has no idea that there are countless others trapped in the darkness surrounding her. They too are reliving the last moments of their lives over and over.
Death snatched Morrigan from life and put her in this place nearly a year earlier. Before a monster dared to kill her, Morrigan was happy. It was a feeling with which she was relatively unfamiliar. Being pregnant and in love helped her find her place in the world just before her existence became a cycle of torment.
One night, while the living Morrigan Fuseli slept comfortably in a cozy cottage, a walking corpse tore her spine from her body. Evil matched the beauty in Morrigan’s life and so her life ended. That walking corpse, once a man named Eric, now exists in a state very similar to Morrigan’s. Morrigan doesn’t even know he killed her. She has forgotten him. She has even forgotten her beloved man of nightmares. She forgets their child too, though it still squirms in her womb in this shadowy place. All of those thoughts fled her consciousness long ago. Here and now, she’s simply the girl who dances and screams while the orchestrator of her demise sits nearby and watches with keen interest.”
Press Kit for Morrigan’s Shadows:
Back Cover Text:
Morrigan’s sleep is plagued with horrors. Afraid the vivid nightmares of her sleeping life will drive her insane, she sticks to a daily routine that comforts her until one day, she decides to change it. Through a series of traumas and encounters that claw at the seams of sanity, Morrigan finds herself confronting reality and it is not what she expected. Journey through Morrigan’s nightmares as they seep into her waking world and threaten to destroy the only peace she has ever experienced.
Excerpt:
“Polished onyx.
That is the only comparison Morrigan’s musing mind can make. Thin, many branched trees of polished onyx as far as she can see in any direction, which is not far. All dreams are limited this way. Like the sides of a snow globe, nightmarish landscapes in the sleeping world can only meander so far before poking at the edges of reality and recoiling from the prospect of spreading too far. The cold, hard edges of the globe remind the landscape that waking the dreamer trapped within will mean its demise, possibly forever. The trees huddle well within their boundaries.
Morrigan walks along, though she has no awareness of her feet, of exertion or any other such mundane detail that the waking world would contain. Every so often, her head snaps up. She is viewing the world through her eyes, so she does not see herself walking through the surreal forest. She can only tell that her head and feet are moving by the way her vision of the trees changes with the movement. As she adjusts her view to peer closer at the unnaturally beautiful trees, she sees a viscous, oily substance dripping from them. It hardens into their gleaming surfaces as she watches.
Craaack! They all move away from her, creating a semi-circle of shining, black floor. Their movement is synchronized, controlled and halted rapidly. It is then that she notices they are all the same tree. The moment the realization comes, they all disappear, save one. Beside it, stands the Winged Man. His head is slightly long, chiseled and painfully handsome. A mop of curly black hair adorns his head. His long neck sits atop broad shoulders that lead down to a tapering, broad chest. His arms look impossibly strong as he wraps them around the tree, squeezing, cracking its exterior, revealing a turquoise blue sap that drips like blood from the trees black bark.”
Short Author Biography
Michelle Barclay is an author, copywriter and occasional artist for pennies. She lives on the South Shore in Massachusetts.
Author Photo
