The Bird - just completed

Bird, The - Eli Easton  

NOTE:  This is a TEMPORARY cover, not a final cover.  I just made it for my own iPad version.

 

It always feels great to turn in a finished story to the publisher.  Today I turned in a novella called "The Bird", which will be part of an anthology called "Bones" and is the second in the gothika series (the first was the just-released "Stitch").

The idea behind gothika is a series of anthologies that contain a few quality novellas with a common theme written by known m/m romance authors. Each story has a gothic romance flavor.  "Stitch" has stories by myself, Jamie Fessenden, Kim Fielding, and Sue Brown and had a Frankenstein/made man theme.  "Bones" will include those same authors plus B.G. Thomas and has a Voodoo theme.

The photo I used on my *TEMP* cover is from the movie "Wide Sargasso Sea" starring Nathaniel Parker. I've always loved films set in the West Indies during the British colonial days.  Stories like "Island of Dr. Moreau", "I Walked with a Zombie", the Night Gallery episode known as “The Caterpiller” where a man visiting the islands has an earwig crawl into his ear. There's something about the mystique of the islands set up against the stiff-upper-lip British which makes for great horror--and hot sex.

Here's a *TEMP* blurb for "The Bird":

Colin Hastings is sent to Jamaica in 1870 to save his father’s sugar cane plantation. If he succeeds, he can marry his fiancée back in London and take his place in proper English society. But Colin finds more than he bargained for on the island. His curiosity about Obeah, the native folk magic, leads him to agree to a dangerous ritual where he is offered his heart’s most secret desire. Colin has buried his sexuality deep inside himself. When that desire is exposed and placed into a bird, Colin becomes haunted by the creature. Is the bird a horror or his one chance at a life worth living?

I'll post more about "The Bird" and the other stories on "Bones" closer to publication.

Eli