Back on Halloween, my two newest novellas were released (separately and also together in one double volume) but I was so buried in day-jobbery and other life nonsense that I did nothing by way of announcing them, so perhaps I will catch up on that now. The new books are The Vampire Circus and Faster, Daniel! Kill! Kill! and I’m kinda pleased with them. Here are the blurbs…

The Vampire Circus…A small town harbors the secret guilt of a horrific event decades ago. A strange illness has begun to infect the population. And an uncanny circus arrives in town. The dazzling members of its troupe can perform impossible physical feats and acts of magic, and their performances have a mesmerizing effect on the townspeople.

Daniel Jasper has started to feel that something is deeply wrong. The arrival of the circus unnerves him and he feels himself slipping away from his normal reality. Why is the circus here? And why now? An eerie encounter with a panther opens a door in his mind. Could they somehow be here for him? Daniel and his friends Kaper and Lukan soon find themselves headed toward a battle with the seductive and deadly ringleader, the mysterious mistress of ceremonies, and the beautiful shapeshifting acrobats of…The Vampire Circus!

Faster, Daniel! Kill! Kill!...Daniel and Lukan, a pair of deeply in-love boyfriends and amiable criminal fugitives, are driving down a desert road and they’re in a really big hurry. They’re rushing their young friend to a place where they hope to enlist a bruja to get rid of a poltergeist that’s been possessing the lad. But unexpected and outré circumstances are going to slow them down. Because they’re making a stop at a weird house that they’ll soon discover is a hall of horror and madness. Our Heroes are about to get trapped in the bizarre and baroque machinations of the diabolical denizens of this annex of Hell!

The ebooks (including one that packages both of them together) have been up on Amazon since 10/31, and I also have a print edition that just went live after having been delayed due to a weird technical issue. The print book is a cute double of both books printed back to back and flipped relative to one another in the style of an old Ace Double. I did this a few years ago with a special print book packaging together The Intersex Boys of Venus (Commander Jace and the Unsuitable Boys Episode #5) and the pornographic sex memoir One Hundred Times.

These two new books, unlike the ten-volume Commander Jace saga and the more recent standalone books Kyler Down in the Spunk Arcade and Kyler Down in the Park, are not volumes of relentless gay smut though they do each have their erotic moments. And they’re still both populated with queer main characters. The two books have no direct relation to one another, but I did give most of the characters the same names in both stories and I made a few little details echo from one to the other. They each take some inspiration from films. For my vampire story, I borrowed the basic structure of the 1972 film Vampire Circus and built upon it what I hope is an even more sick-ass story than what that wild movie tells. The title of the second story will remind some people of Russ Meyer’s film Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, and my book begins somewhat similarly in that the main characters are driving recklessly through a desert but then things take a turn toward the extremely bizarre. I’ve annotated the text with a few footnotes that imply that this story is one part of a series starring these characters though no other installments of this implied series have yet been written.