The 2009 Black Quill Award Nominations pt. 7

As Fate Would Have It

Author: Calvillo, Michael Louis
Artwork: Peter Mahaichuk
Cover Design: Cesar Puch
Format: Limited Edition Hardcover
Type: Novel
Page Count: 300pp.
Pub. Date: 2009
Publisher: Bad Moon Books
Also Pub: February 2010 (Hardcover — Bad Moon Books)

Nominated for the 2009 Black Quill Award for Best Cover Art and Design

Montgomery, a gourmet chef on the fast track to fame, has a teensy weensy problem. He’s a murderous cannibal addicted to human flesh.

Guilt and worry eat his brain and beg him to stop, but his headstrong girlfriend Liz won’t let him quit. She blames Montgomery for getting her hooked on the succulent meat and refuses to curb her carnal urges.

Ashley, a twenty-something trying to figure her place in life, desperately wants to kick the nasty heroin habit she acquired with her boyfriend Henry a year and a half ago.

Henry wants to make Ashley happy and quit, but no matter how hard he tries he can’t seem to resist the drug’s consuming pull.

As Montgomery and Ashley struggle with codependence, with love, with loss, with sorrow and regret they seek to find salvation in the unlikeliest of places — each other.

The Estuary

Author: Gunn, Derek
Artwork: Johann Bodin
Cover Design: Jacob Kier
Format: Trade Paperback
Type: Novel
Page Count: 280pp.
Pub. Date: June 30, 2009
Publisher: Permuted Press

Nominated for the 2009 Black Quill Award for Best Cover Art and Design

Journalist John Pender has returned to his home town of Whiteshead to rekindle his marriage.

Ex-British Intelligence Officer Dave Johnson has arrived to isolate himself after his fiancee is murdered during a mission that went terribly wrong.

But excavations for the new shopping centre unearth a mysterious contagion that threatens to throw their lives into chaos.

Now the residents of Whiteshead are trapped within a quarantine zone with the military on one side and ravenous hordes on the other. Escape is no longer an option.

Far out in the mouth of the estuary a small keep sits forlornly surrounded by an apron of jagged rocks. This refuge has always been unassailable, a place of myth and legend that has grown in folklore through the years.

Now, it’s the survivors’ only hope of sanctuary.

But there are thousands of flesh-eating infected between them and the keep and time is running out . . .

The Haunted Heart And Other Tales

Author: Currier, Jameson
Artwork: Richard Taddei
Cover Design: John Molloy
Format: Trade Paperback
Type: Short Story Collection
Page Count: 212pp.
Pub. Date: September 15, 2009
Publisher: Lethe Press

Nominated for the 2009 Black Quill Award for Best Cover Art and Design

Haunted?

. . . Or blessed?

Ghosts?

. . . Or guardian angels?

Twelve new stories of gay men and the memories that haunt them.

A circuit boy stays at a haunted hotel. An actor recounts a grisly murder in the English countryside. A gay parent unravels a mysterious souvenir. A journalist chases a story through the streets of Amsterdam. An artist grapples with his muse. A musician is inspired by the spirit of a sailor.

Acclaimed author Jameson Currier modernizes the traditional ghost story with gay lovers, loners, activists, and addicts, blending history and contemporary issues of the gay community with the unexpected of the supernatural.

The Pilo Family Circus

Author: Elliott, Will
Cover Design: Heidi Whitcomb
Format: Trade Paperback
Type: Novel
Page Count: 336pp.
Pub. Date: March 24, 2009
Publisher: Underland Press
Original Pub: January 2008 (Hardcover — ABC Books)

Nominated for the 2009 Black Quill Award for Best Cover Art and Design

“You have two days to pass your audition. You better pass it, feller. You’re joining the circus. Ain’t that the best news you ever got?”

Delivered by a trio of psychotic clowns, this ultimatum plunges Jamie into the horrific alternate universe that is the centuries-old Pilo Family Circus, a borderline world between Hell and Earth from which humankind’s greatest tragedies have been perpetrated.

Yet in this place — peopled by the gruesome, grotesque, and monstrous — where violence and savagery are the norm, Jamie finds that his worst enemy is himself.

When he applies the white face paint, he is transformed into JJ, the most vicious clown of all.

And JJ wants Jamie dead!

Echoes of Lovecraft, Bret Easton Ellis, Chuck Palahniuk, and early Stephen King resound through the pages of this magical, gleefully macabre work nominated as Best Novel by the International Horror Guild.