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 ...

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 ...

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.

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 ...

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 ...

Here are eight of World Fantasy Award winner S.P. Somtow’s most controversial stories, including three previously uncollected ones. Each deals with a “sacred cow” of the Judaeo-Christian tradition and subjects it to the pitiless scrutiny of historian, mythographer, and fantasist. Violent, sometimes kinky, these stories nevertheless reach surprising epiphanies about faith and redemption. A curiously sympathetic Antichrist hunts down the next messiah with the aid of a unicorn. St Paul ponders about whether, in order to make his miraculous new religion work, he needs to get rid of an ...

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 ...

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 ...

The Inquestor Series was a classic science fiction series of the 1980s — and has now been reincarnated for the 21st century, with more adventures, more spectacle, and more extras. Tachyon bubbles, people bins and galactic empires — and profound family conflicts — Greek tragedy writ large. Light on the Sound, the book that started it all, begins with one lonely planet and three lost souls, and ends with galactic revolution. For twenty thousand years, the godlike Inquestors have held sway over the one million worlds of the Dispersal of Man. S.P. Somtow’s limitless ...

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.

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 ...

S.P. Somtow’s much anthologized story The Fallen Country, and the acclaimed young adult novel that derived from it, have been favorites since the 1980s when they first appeared. In 2015, wearing his other hat as one of the leading contemporary opera composers, Somtow premiered his opera The Snow Dragon, a third variation on this theme, taking the characters into a whole new dimension. This volume collects all three variants — short story, novel, and opera libretto, to form a fascinating study in the evolution of a writer’s mind over a thirty-five year period. The Snow Dragon is the ...

Somtow’s very popular Club X series is consistently on Vella’s “Top Faved” lists. Season Two, “Club X: Zombie in the Fridge” is now available as a book. The first book has been made into a web TV series which will be released in 2023. Join Kim, Fluke, Polo, Danger, and Donut as they embark on a wild journey in S.P. Somtow’s second book in the “Club X” series! Set in a mysterious Thai boarding school, these five friends cross into alternate universes, fight zombies and quirky nuns, and team up with their vampire English teacher to uncover the secrets of the universe. With a...

This novella was the precursor to S.P. Somtow's groundbreaking historical epic Moon Dance, one of the most successful and controversial werewolf novels novels of the late 20th century. It details the journey of Speranza Martinique, a turn-of-the-century governess, by train through Europe with a young boy who may be a werewolf.

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 ...

A retrospective collection of S.P, Somtow’s science fiction stories, from Sunsteps which first appeared in Unearth magazine in 1977 to An Alien Heresy from 2007, this book covers thirty years of the wide-ranging author-composer’s career, including numerous award-nominated stories. From comedic zombie protest marches to alien roller coaster cults, from ambiguous utopias to enjoyable dystopias, from a mediaeval inquisitor confronting an alien to an alien inquestor confronting a planet, these are bizarre and wondrous tales, both serious and satiric. With illustrations from the sketches of ...

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 ...

After forty years, S.P. Somtow has produced a fifth novel in the Chronicles of the High Inquest, one of the most lauded galactic empire epics of the 1980s. Critically acclaimed yet never previously in print as a complete set, the series has passionate adherents — and they have finally persuaded the author to enrich the universe with more novels. Homeworld of the Heart is the first of a trilogy within a trilogy. The songs of Sajit were known and loved through the million worlds of the Dispersal of Man. He was the favorite of Elloran, most powerful, most compassionate of the godlike ...

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 ...

Announced thirty years ago from the now-defunct Pulphouse Press, S.P. Somtow's theme collection of stories about Fathers and Sons has been "about to come out" ever since. Diplodocus Press now brings the collection into print just as it would have been in the 1990s, an interesting snapshot of Somtow's career up to that moment. There are four stories in this mini-collection, with far-flung settings. "Kingdoms in the Sky," about a mafia don taking his son to Peru to participate in an ancient and terrifying ceremony; "Fire from the Wine-Dark Sea," in which a tormented poet with twin sons meets ...