Showing results by author "S. P. Somtow" in All Categories

Finally available in one volume! The decadence of Imperial Rome comes to life in S.P. Somtow's Literary Titan Award-winning novel about one of ancient history's wildest characters. The historian Suetonius tells us that the Emperor Nero emasculated and married his slave Sporus, the spitting image of murdered Empress Poppaea. But history has more tidbits about Sporus, who went from "puer delicatus" to Empress to one Emperor and concubine to another, and ended up being sentenced to play the Earth-Goddess in the arena. from Literary Titan "If you like your historical fiction brutal and ...

35 years after the first Mallworld story was produced, S.P. Somtow has produced the Ultimate, Ultimate, Ultimate Mallworld collection. Included are all the original stories (and the one story left out of the Starblaze trade edition), all the ads for the Mallworld products (left out in the TOR mass market re-printing), and all the original artwork by Karl Kofoed (the artwork was not included in the TOR edition) and Kofoed's cover art (left out of the Meisha Merlin edition!) With a new introduction by the author. Mallworld was an iconic science fiction novel of the 1980s and a pungent satire ...

Firmly rooted in modern archaeological discoveries about Bronze Age cultures, The Shattered Horse paints a vivid picture of a decaying golden age seen through the eyes of the survivors of Trojan War. At the center of the story is Prince Astyanax: heir to the Trojan kingdom, marked for death as a child by the Greek conquerors, escaping, perhaps by divine intervention, and doomed, perhaps, to repeat history.

"S.P. Somtow doesn't write like anyone else" — Dean R. Koontz Virgin. Mother. Goddess. Miriam of Nazareth was all three. S.P. Somtow's deconstructive retelling of the life of the most famous woman in history is set in a richly pagan world, where hellenism coexisted with monotheism, where Roman-occupied Judaea was not all sand and zealots but a richly-layered territory of a polyglot, multiethnic world. It's a world where women still practice their ancient mysteries alongside the rigidly structured society of patriarchs. Perhaps controversial, "Miriam" lay in a drawer for two decades ...

Now acknowledged as one of the most important classics of 20th-century gothic literature, S.P. Somtow's tale of a 12-year-old rock star vampire, his Jungian analyst, and the Wagnerian conductor who is his nemesis turned the entire genre upside down in the 1980s and is considered the ancestor of the "splatterpunk" movement. Vampire Junction has been voted one of the top 40 horror books of all time.

two misfits lost in paradise … a serial killer and a lonely boy S.P. Somtow’s World Fantasy Award winning novella is set in a picturesque Thai village just after the Second World War. This classic reimagining of Thailand’s most famous serial killer and his relationship with a fictional American boy was originally conceived as a film. Now, twenty years later, that conception is finally moving towards reality. As a bonus, the novella comes paired with the short story "Chui Chai," about a modern-day Frankenstein operating among the sex workers of Bangkok. It's one of S.P. Somtow's most ...

The sequel to S.P. Somtow's groundbreaking novel Vampire Junction - voted one of the top 40 horror books of all time - was called by Robert Bloch, author of Psycho, "the closest thing to a nightmare ever put on paper." Timmy Valentine vanished from the world in a bloody conflagration in a small Idaho town. Ten years later, they're making a movie about his mysterious life. Angel Todd is mountain boy from Hangman's Holler, Kentucky, who has won the Timmy Valentine lookalike contest. But the movie stirs up old evils — a fanatic televangelist, a dark-forces worshipping New Age witch, a ...

The Millennial War left a sullen void where civilization once stood. But then the whales began their song - a mysterious song that resounded throughout the polluted seas and told an ancient heartbreaking tale that moved the survivors to revive and honored ritual....

The conclusion of the three-book series that began with Delicatus and continued with Imperatrix. Captured by pirates as a boy and trafficked to the slave markets of Rome, Sporus rose from a poet's plaything to one of the most powerful figures in the Roman Empire. The historian Suetonius tells us that the Emperor Nero emasculated and married his slave Sporus, the spitting image of murdered Empress Poppaea. But history has more tidbits about Sporus, who went from "puer delicatus" to Empress to one Emperor and concubine to another, and ended up being sentenced to play the Earth-Goddess in the ...

The decadence of Imperial Rome comes to life in S.P. Somtow's Literary Titan Award-winning novel about one of ancient history's wildest characters. The historian Suetonius tells us that the Emperor Nero emasculated and married his slave Sporus, the spitting image of murdered Empress Poppaea. But history has more tidbits about Sporus, who went from "puer delicatus" to Empress to one Emperor and concubine to another, and ended up being sentenced to play the Earth-Goddess in the arena. World Fantasy Award winner S.P. Somtow weaves a vivid adventure about one of the most colorful personalities ...

It is A.D. 69 and the Emperor Nero has been declared "Damnatio Memoriae" — his memory is to be erased from the world. But what will happen to Sporus, once a slave boy, then the emasculated Empress of the mad Caesar? The third instalment of the saga provides a brief respite to the drama as Nero takes Sporus on a Greek tour ... where the dream becomes a nightmare. The third volume of the award-nominated trilogy by S.P. Somtow, this work completes a tale of magnificence, corruption and decadence seen from a unique worm's eye view of a character who is usually relegated to a footnote in ...

Season One of World Fantasy Award-winning author S.P. Somtow's vella series is adapted and compiled into book form. St. Cecilia's boys' school is an elite boys' school in a remote part of Thailand, a hotbed of hormones, mystery, fantasy, and dark secrets! Five kids (binary and non-binary) uncover the dark secrets of their school amid mysteries of identity and sexual attraction. Why does Dr. Leopold Strange only teach after sundown? Why is Sister Euphemia dancing in the forest without her habit? And why can't Kim and Fluke talk about the awful thing that happened to them in Oldenburg? And ...

Captured by pirates and sold to a Roman aristocrat as a sex slave, Sporus attracted the attention of no less a personage than the Emperor Nero, ruler of the known world. Would-be poet, patron of the arts, aesthete, and brutal autocrat, the Divine Nero saw in the boy a startling resemblance to the Empress Poppaea - and made him an empress as well. Suetonius, Tacitus, and other Roman historians have given tantalizing glimpses into the incredible life story of the boy who became twice an empress to two emperors, and was condemned to die in the arena by a third. In this meticulously researched ...

Somtow's The Pavilion of Frozen Women was nominated in 1992 for the World Fantasy Award, and as a basis for a collection by the same name was nominated a second time in 1997. Set during the Hokkaido Snow Festival, it tells of a mysterious snow sculpture of three goddesses — Athena, Hera, and Aphrodite, created by an indigenous artist, and of the American Lakota woman who is in Japan, reporting on this artist who may or not be a serial killer, and who may or not be connected to her own ancestral past as a member of the Bear People.

The conclusion of S.P. Somtow's award-winning epic set during the time of the Emperor Nero, based on the true story of a slave who ended up as Nero's empress. The Emperor has returned to Rome after a triumphant tour of Greece in which he won all the major laurels at the Olympic games, even though he did not compete in an Olympiad year. Now he and Sporus must face conspiracy and downfall, and the boy-empress must navigate the treacherous currents of imperial politics when four Emperors compete for power in a single year.

After two thousand years of immortality, Timmy Valentine has finally become a real boy, having swapped his vampire nature with look-alike Angel Todd. But something is missing ... in a desperate bid to salvage his career, he goes on a world tour ... a harrowing, sweeping journey that stretches through Europe, the red-light districts of Bangkok, to the jungles of New Guinea. Scouring his past, he encounters Jack the Ripper, Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde, Christopher Marlowe, and ultimately the Dark Lord himself - Dracula. "The closest thing to a nightmare ever put on paper" - Robert Bloch, author ...

Based on an acclaimed short story that was nominated for the Bram Stoker Award, "Darker Angels" takes the reader from the bloodstained battlefields of Virginia to the slave auctions of Haiti. Walt Whitman, Abraham Lincoln, Lord Byron, and Marie Leveau, the legendary voodoo queen of New Orleans, all have a part to play in the epic tale of a mysterious, one-eyed shaman who dares to raise the dead from the battlefields of the Civil War.

In this exotic retelling of the fairy tale of Bluebeard, a New Age thirty-something from California is swept off her feet by an enigmatic Thai millionaire and soon finds herself in Bangkok’s brave new world of shamans, shopping malls, and high society serial killers. Originally written as a cliff-hanging series for Bangkok’s The Nation newspaper, The Other City of Angels is a roller-coaster roman-à-clef that leapfrogs from genre to genre and culture to culture, turning the western preconception of Bangkok as a city “of temples and prostitutes” on its ear. A darkly comic odyssey ...

At twelve years old, Little Frog has a richly fantastic and sustaining innerlife. It is 1963, his parents have disappeared, and he lives with his maiden aunts, known affectionately as the Three Fates, on the family estate in Bangkok. But, fed by a stream ofbooks and accompanied by his pet chameleon, Little Frogrefuses to accept thathe is Thai, eats English food, speaks only English, and answers to the name of Justin.Into Justin’s eclectically fashioned, whirlingfantasy world steps Virgil, a black American boy, and together they embark on a glorious spree of magic and growing up – in ...

The widowed Mrs. Dorrit lives a marginal existence with her brother, a vicar, and twin daughters in a cottage on the estate of her wealthy cousin, Lord Chuzzlewit, in the West London village of Little Chiswick. As the season dawns and a rakish Earl takes up residence in the once-abandoned Flanders House nearby, their lives, and the marital prospects of Emma's daughters, become immeasurably complicated when a starship lands in her apple orchard. A rollicking satire that blends the world of Jane Austen with the sci-fi universes of E.T. and The Day the Earth Stood Still by World Fantasy Award-...