The sea is coming…
A TALE OF THREE CITIES by Elana Gomel is a sharp, shadowy, and hallucinatory speculative noir blending of magic, murder, and mystery! The dream sea and its secrets are waiting for you!
Read an exclusive excerpt of A Tale of Three Cities!
The sky is starless, but they are sitting in a pool of pale anemic light. From the porch she can see the garden where jagged branches like spikes of barbed wire jut into the dead air, black on black. There is a pitcher and two glasses on the table but when she tries to pour some lemonade the liquid runs heavy and viscous. A song is playing somewhere in the depth of the house, a scratchy, tinny sound: “Dark summer days/sweet summer nights.”
Her companion smiles at her with the right side of his face. The left corner of his mouth where flesh still clings to the bone curves down in disapproval.
She stares at her hands. They are marble-white, the skin taut like virgin paper. Touching her cheek, she slides her fingers toward the place where she thinks her mouth should be.
The voice keeps repeating the same phrase and she thinks: the needle is in the groove.
What is a needle? What is a groove?
She drops her hand, not having found anything.
Her companion stirs by her side, and the pale light flares in the sky, and a wave of emotion surges through her. She cannot give it a name.
“There are no nights anymore,” he says.
But there will be, she thinks.
The song sputters into discordant notes and she wills it to continue but it does not.
Not yet.
Another flare in the sky and she thinks: the sea is coming.
“It won’t reach us here,” he says, and she suddenly knows the name of the emotion that pours into her emptiness like water into a broken cup.
Hatred.
“Sweet summer days/dark summer nights,” the song erupts again, the scratchy baritone defying the silence.
It is a gramophone, she realizes. It is a needle in the groove.
It has started again.
“These are the people,” says her companion and beyond the tangle of the dead garden she glimpses a dusty road and people walking by: women carrying bundles and silent babies; men, their shoulders bent, and their faces hidden, balancing flotsam of lost lives on their backs; ragged children; cripples in carts pushed by other cripples.
There cannot be any people! Where did they come from?
The people are not alone. There is a skulking fox creeping in the wake of the procession, and a wounded hare, leaping behind, and an asthmatic bobcat, its torn hide dripping dark blood into the dust.
No!
“Not many,” says her companion. “Not many at all. But enough. Perhaps.”
Where are they going?
“There is a city,” he says. “If they reach it, they will be safe.”
They will never be safe, she thinks, they will never be safe from me.
Dive into the dream sea today!
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In a city built on myth and soaked in rain, truth is the most dangerous thing you can find.
When a women’s corpse explodes in the rain outside the Temple and floods half the Hill, Mara Raven is pulled away from the search for her missing husband and back into the job she never wished for: using her strange Power to fish for killers in a city rotting from the inside out.
Mara Raven doesn’t believe in gods or monsters. The only thing she puts her faith in is the dream-sea — an eerie, otherworldly current only she can dive into, dragging up secrets others prefer to stay buried. The Temple wants silence, preferring to pray to the Slaughtered Ones, long dead ancestors Mara doesn’t believe ever existed. The constables want results. And someone else, known only as the Revealer, wants to open the ancient Gate to the so-called Abode of the Ancestors, an act which may prove disastrous.
As the city drowns in its myths and murder, Mara follows a trail of blood, lies, and twisted devotion as nightmares from the dream-sea begin to bleed into reality. A seal has been broken. Something is coming through that Gate, and it’s not forgiveness for the city’s sins.
Dark, hallucinatory, and sharp as broken glass, A Tale of Three Cities is a speculative noir mystery for readers who like their heroines mad, bad, and haunted.
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About Elana Gomel
Born in Ukraine and currently residing in California, Elana Gomel is an academic with a long list of books and articles, an award-winning writer, and a professional nomad. She has taught in Israel, Italy, and the US, and is known in the academy for her (purely theoretical) interest in serial killers, alien invasions, and rebellious AIs. Her upcoming academic publication is Palgrave Handbook of Global Fantasy. She is the author of more than a hundred stories, several novellas, and five novels of dark fantasy and dark science fiction. Several of her stories appeared in Best of the Year anthologies. Her most recent publications are Nigtwood, a novel of fairy tales and exile, and the collection My Lady of Plagues and Other Gothic Fairy Tales. She is a member of HWA.
Connect with Elana
Website: https://www.citiesoflightanddarkness.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/elanagomel
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/elana.gomel
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Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1224747.Elana_Gomel
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B001KHVFCE
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