Tag: #dystopian

Posted in Book Tours

To Hell and Back

Posted on by Reluctant Retiree

To Hell and Back
Bill Blume
Publication date: January 20th 2026
Genres: Adult, Fantasy

For one pair of swordfighters, their marriage is worth going to Hell and back.

Ty and Dani are a modern-day, swordfighting husband-and-wife duo who help with exorcisms until a demon kills Dani’s mother and all of their fellow exorcists. Now, they’re on a quest for revenge through the realms of Hell, and killing the demon is just the start of the journey. To keep the demon from reviving, Dani and Ty must escape Hell within seven days and cast the demon’s head and heart into an Eternal Flame. To get back to the mortal realm in time, they rely on their small terrier Wicket to lead them past the demon’s army and thousands of other horrors.

To Hell and Back takes readers on an epic journey perfect for those who believe love can overcome any challenge and that a devoted dog makes the perfect guide no matter where you need to go.

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EXCERPT:

They didn’t drive far, parking on a cobblestone street next to the café, sitting on a street corner. The entire front wall of the café was made up of tall doors that were all turned open to take advantage of the pleasant spring weather. Ty sucked down his coffee. It tasted stronger than what he preferred, but as tired as he was, he considered that a good thing.

“I imagine you have a lot of questions.” Maria sat at one of the tables closest to the sidewalk with people dressed in business suits and hospital scrubs walking by. She crossed her legs and leaned back in her chair, draping her arm over the back of it.

“I’m told you work for the church?” He decided against gambling on whether it was the Catholic or Episcopal Church.

“Heard that, did you?” She cracked an amused grin, as if she’d been privy to his conversation with Barry. “That’s only partially true. We’re funded by the Church of England, but we don’t answer to them.”

Taking a chug of his coffee, Ty then asked, “And who is we?”

“A fair question, and I’ll get to that soon enough.” She paused for her own sip of coffee. When she continued, she stared out at the street as cars rumbled across the cobblestones. “I’d like to talk about you a bit first. I notice you’ve started the transition.”

“The what?”

“Oh, you’re trying to find a way to make a living off that sword arm of yours that doesn’t require a nine-to-five job typing on a keyboard or some other nonsense. You’re going the usual route: giving lessons to wannabes drunk on fantasies of medieval knights or Star Wars. You know. The usual stuff.” She looked at him with a smirk that assured him she already knew the answer to her next question. “You enjoying all that?”

He cleared his throat and sniffed. His sinuses were still killing him.

“I’m paying my bills.” He shrugged, trying to mimic her nonchalance by turning his focus out onto the street and the passersby. Didn’t keep him from seeing her amused reaction to his answer, that she knew he was full of shit.

Yeah, he’d taken to giving part-time lessons at a local fencing club that included saber fighting. Most of the job seemed more about punishing clients into the realization that they weren’t going to turn into Inigo Montoya overnight and that fighting with a sword required both finesse and brutality. Being good with a sword required a killer instinct. Forcing others with limited skills to realize they didn’t have that certain something was taking a toll on him.

“Look, Mr. Faison.” She leaned forward, crossing her arms on the table. “For some people that’s enough, and that’s fine.” The way she said “fine” left little doubt it was anything but that. “But someone like you…” She shook her head.

He tried to bluff, acting amused and disinterested, but his acting skills failed him again. “You think so?”

The way her expression hardened, that single eye narrowing on him, forced his full focus on her. “I think you’re the kind of person who’s only ever whole when he’s got a sword in his hand and a real fight in front of him.”

She leaned back in her chair again, with all the satisfaction of a wildcat dining on a fresh kill. The silence offered him a chance to respond, but she’d left him speechless. No one had ever peeled him down to his bones like this—not even his parents—not this fast or with such ease.

After giving him his chance to answer and seeing he wasn’t able to, Maria sipped her coffee and then continued. “You’re twenty-six. You used to finish in the top three at most competitions you entered but you haven’t in more than a year. It’s not that your skills or body are fading, and it’s not because you’re distracted by the side work that pays the bills. No, it’s because even the competitions are starting to bore you. Those fights aren’t real anymore, because all that’s at stake there is pride.”

“And what? You’re offering me a ‘real fight’? What is this? Some kind of underground sword fight club, where the loser dies, and the first rule is to not talk about it?”

She shook her head, grinning at his attempt at wit. “This is no game or club. Underground? Somewhat. But what you’ll be doing will make a real difference in people’s lives. I’m offering you a chance to reclaim that fire that ignited the moment you first touched a sword.

“I’m giving you a chance to find your heart.”

Author Bio:

Bill Blume discovered his love for the written word while in high school and has been writing ever since. His latest novel, West of Apocalypse, is now available from Time Killer Publishing. His short stories have been published in many fantasy anthologies and various ezines.

Like the father figure in his “Gidion Keep, Vampire Hunter” novels, Bill works as a 911 dispatcher for Henrico County Police and has done so for more than two decades. He served as the 2013 chair for James River Writers, which produces one of the nation’s best annual conferences for educating and connecting writers.

He graduated from the University of South Carolina with a degree in Broadcast Journalism in 1995. In the years after, he worked as a TV news producer, first in Columbus, Georgia, and then in Richmond, Virginia, which has become home for Bill & his family.

You can learn more about Bill at his website: http://www.billblume.net.

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To Hell and Back Blitz

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Posted in Book Tours

Exile

Posted on by Reluctant Retiree

Together or not at all.

Exile

The Price of Talent Book 5

by AK Nevermore

Genre: Spicy Dystopian Romance




Together or not at all.

 

On an alternate earth, a cataclysm has altered a subset of the population. Talents are persecuted for their psychic and physical mutations, giving rise to two conflicting societies based upon maintaining genetic purity. And the Source, a shadowy corporate entity dependent upon the exploitation of captive Talents, is hunting them…


Flynn Scot is spiraling.


After a cataclysmic chain of events and devastating loss, Flynn’s grasp on reality is slipping. Backed into a corner by the Assembly and his sanity called into question, the threat of exile and having his talent stripped endangers not only him, but any chance he might have of getting his family back…if they’re not already past saving.


Deep in stasis, Kara’s fate is uncertain.


Stolen away and in the clutches of a madman, Kara’s future depends solely upon Titus’s sufferance. With unfettered access to her genome, his attention is fixated upon the next iteration of Talents—especially after events in the North change her status from prize to bait.


Because Flynn is coming for her, and he’s not coming alone.

 

 

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Cal grimaced and climbed to his feet as Glynfyls stopped shaking. He clutched his breast, groping for the ward Miriam had set some thirty-odd years ago that tied Flynn back to him. Please, God… Cal exhaled, his knees buckling in relief. Still there. Felt different, but the boy wasn’t dead.

Not yet at least.

His gaze slid from the calamity outside the window to the blood spattered across the wall and the gore-soaked carpet. In the unlikely event House Scot survived the next seventy-two hours, the whole damned room would have to be gutted. He dropped the last of his cigarette and ground it out beside Cordelia Kerns’s corpse.

And if they didn’t survive, screw the resale value. What a goddamned mess.

“Here’s a spot, there’s a spot…” he muttered to himself, bastardizing lines from his brief stint in community theater. Seemed appropriate. He couldn’t clearly remember his last wife’s smile or the faces of any of the children he’d buried, but every goddamned line from that play, every goddamned moment he’d spent with her, was seared into his memory in high goddamned definition.

Her. Elize. Lizzy. His Lilith.

Cal ran a shaking hand down his face. Squatted. Knees cracking, he leaned forward to lower Kerns’s lids and cover the look of surprise in her grayed-over baby blues, his gaze locking on the imprint of a bloody crescent between her brows—

A flash of memory—the same mark on his second wife—hit him hard.

He stumbled into a chair and pulled out his pouch of tobacco, cursing the tremor in his hands. Fingers fumbling, he threw aside the botched attempt. Deep breath. Rolled another. It was passible, barely. He lit it. Blew out a frenetic puff of smoke and spat tobacco from his lip.

His gaze drifted back to Kerns’s corpse. Another woman with her throat slit. Wasn’t related to Julia’s earlier demise, but that wouldn’t stop Crandall and the city’s rumor mill from having a goddamned field day with it.

Christ. Between that and Flynn’s tantrum destroying everything as far as the eye could see, House Scot was on borrowed time.

And when the press caught wind of Kara’s abduction, it would be worse.

What a clusterfuck. If there’d been any place to go, Cal would’ve started packing his bags, but this time, there wasn’t. Jane—Mother—had made sure of that.

He blew out a ragged stream of smoke and glanced at the couch as he brought the sad excuse for a cigarette to his lips again. Kara’s cat glared back. Miserable animal was wrapped around Fitz’s throat with its green eyes narrowed. Cal frowned at the rise and fall of the boy’s chest. Looked like taking pity on fuck ups was still part of Elize’s MO.

Not that the boy was losing any sleep over his brush with death. He was sawing wood like he didn’t have a care in the world thanks to Nora’s induced coma. Must be nice.

Cal took another drag, cursing himself and the lingering scent of Elize’s perfume. The barest hint of bergamot dragging his mind back to that first summer they’d met. To the stolen kisses during rehearsals. To the way the lighting had hit the curve of her cheek and the look she’d throw over her shoulder as she sauntered into the wings. Christ, that still got his dick hard.

Too bad her seduction had been as much of a role as the one she’d played on stage.

He’d hauled sets around the whole damned summer for that shit, podunk production to be close to her. Senator Dashell’s daughter. What she’d seen in the son of a pig farmer—Christ. In retrospect, he knew exactly what she’d seen. Or rather, what her father had. Man hadn’t blinked twice at pimping her out for twelve hundred acres just outside of town where the Corporation could build their research facility.

And damn them, but they’d gotten it.

Why her and her brother had stuck around after, slumming with the five of them—

Cal shook his head, staring at the blood pooling beneath Kerns. What was done, was done, and his hands had never been clean. No. He’d been up to his goddamned elbows in this shit from the get-go, but this right here? This was gonna sink him and everything he’d worked for since.

As intended.

He fished the slip of paper Elize had left on Kara’s pillow from his breast pocket, his fingers shying from the braid coiled beside it. Entwined E’s on the letterhead and beneath the monogram, a set of coordinates with four damning words.

 

40°49’26.99” N-73°55’20.99” W

Queen takes pawn.

Check.

 

Elize…Enoch…the twins were just pieces, not who he’d been playing against. Cal stroked a heavy hand over his mustache. Knowing the message for the invitation it was.

Jane had made her move, and now it was his. For better or worse, the endgame had begun.



**Don’t miss the rest of the series!**


Find out more at the Author’s Website!

https://aknevermore.com/books/

 

**FREEBIE ALERT! – Get the prequel- Breeder FREE!!**

https://aknevermore.com/books/breaker/breeder/

 


AK Nevermore enjoys operating heavy machinery, freebases coffee, and gives up sarcasm for Lent every year. A Jane-of-all-trades, she’s a certified chef, restores antiques, and dabbles in beekeeping when she’s not reading voraciously or running down the dream in her beat-up camo Chucks.

Unable to ignore the voices in her head, and unwilling to become medicated, she writes Science Fiction and Fantasy full time.

She pays the bills editing, wielding a wicked hot pink pen and writing a column on SFF. She also belongs to the Authors Guild, is a chapter treasurer for the RWA, teaches creative writing, and on the rare occasion, sleeps.

 

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Posted in #LGTBQ+

The Collateral — Part 2: Secured Asset

Posted on by Reluctant Retiree

Please remember that this story is set in a dystopian future where the illegal immigration problem was solved by reducing people to slavery. Is it dark? Yes, Is it against our current laws? Yes. Could it happen? One last time, I feel compelled to answer “Yes.” – Reluctant Retiree

I became a slave to save my family. It was supposed to be a formality for a bank loan. Nothing but a change of my status on a piece of paper.

But it isn’t working out that way.

My older brother keeps whispering in my dad’s ear, reminding him that I’m no longer his son. I’m his property. And one by one, Dad is finding an excuse to break his promises. He’s even got a chain collar welded around my neck.

My friends and neighbors are starting to look at me differently. Not as the boy that they’ve known for years. But as a blond-haired blue-eyed piece of livestock.

And my big brother has some ideas on how to make money with a fresh young slave.

Posted in My Likes and Dislikes

The Collateral Part 1

Posted on by Reluctant Retiree

Please remember that this story is set in a dystopian future where the illegal immigration problem was solved by reducing people to slavery. Is it dark? Yes, Is it against our current laws? Yes. Could it happen? One last time, I feel compelled to answer “Yes.” – Reluctant Retiree

“It’s just a formality.”: An Intense MM Dystopian Saga

This isn’t supposed to happen to guys like me. I’m not a criminal or an illegal alien. I’m a middle-class boy from a good family.

But my dad’s business hit a rough patch, and he needed a loan to save it. And he only had one asset left that the bank would accept as collateral.

Me.

Dad said that it wouldn’t be so bad. That it would only be for a few years, and I’d be a free man again as soon as he paid off the loan. He made it sound like I’d be waiting tables or mowing lawns. Hard work that would “build character,” he told me.

But Dad hadn’t thought about how things would change once I was in the collar.Or what other uses the bank might find for a blond eighteen-year-old slave.

Note: This is the start of an intense dystopian MM saga. While the series ends in an HEA, the first few books are a descent into the shadows. Expect high angst, psychological intensity, and a hero pushed to his limits.

The Reviews!

The Collateral — Part 1: “It’s just a formality.”: An Intense MM Dystopian Saga by Josh Hunter
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

What a great start to the series!

Let me recap what we have learned about our main characters:
1. Dominic (the father) is a restaurant owner who has no idea how to change with the times. When the town was booming, he built a successful restaurant business. However, when things in the town went downhill, he either had no idea how to keep his business afloat, or was unwilling to make the necessary changes.
2. Doug (the older brother) apparently has been a bully all his life. Unfortunately as he has endeared himself to his father, he can do no wrong in his father’s eyes. Doug is the one who convinced his father to talk Wes into becoming a slave so Dominic can use Wes as collateral for a loan. Dominic apparently hasn’t researched anything about owning a slave but you can be sure that Doug has.
3. Wes (main character) is within mere weeks of turning 18 and becoming a citizen. Unfortunately the only way his father can get a loan to save the family restaurant is for Wes to be enslaved and used as collateral for the loan. Wes loves his little sister and doesn’t want to see her homeless. So he naively believes his father’s promises.

View all my reviews 
Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars 
A great dystopian novel
Reviewed in the United States on August 1, 2025
Verified Purchase
The Collateral is a great dystopian novel masquerading as an mm dark romance/erotica. Set in an ordinary California town in a future not so far away (and startlingly realistic) where slavery is back as a way of solving the problem of rounding up undocumented workers en masse, it chronicles the slow and steady degradation of Wes, an ordinary middle-class blond, blue-eyed teenager who agrees to allow himself be enslaved for four years to solve his father’s money problems, as a way of getting his father to love him. He is so naïve, so innocent.
In the first volume, the outline of his likely future is laid out in some telling short episodes: as a slave, he is simply regarded as a sexual object. The power of the enslaver to abuse slaves sexually, to make them the object of sexual violence and humiliation, is at the heart of slavery (shades of Toni Morrison and any other number of Black theorists) in Hunter’s analysis: this is where the genre of gay erotica and dystopian novel overlap. Most of his father’s promises to him are quickly broken within the first few hours of his enslavement: this first installment only covers a few hours, with some backstory. It only gets worse. This series really got me by the throat, in part because it uses the violence that is now being made visible in our politics and takes it one step further. Is this our future?
Posted in Book Tours

High Couch of Silistra

Posted on by Reluctant Retiree

High Couch of Silistra, first of the notorious Silistra Quartet, brings us to a realm where thought alters probability, where creativity is inextricably linked to the urge to own and dominate, and where the universe itself is amenable to a focused mind.

Rooted deeply in humanity’s mythic past yet unaware of the planet Earth, High Couch of Silistra begins one woman’s mythic quest for self-knowledge – with surprising results.


High Couch of Silistra

The Silistra Quartet Book 1

by Janet Morris

Genre: Dystopian Epic SciFi Fantasy Romance



Biology shapes reality…

One woman’s mythic search for self-realization in a distant tomorrow…

Her sensuality was at the core of her world, her quest beyond the civilized stars.

Aristocrat. Outcast. Picara. Slave. Ruler.



“Engrossing characters in a marvelous adventure.” – Charles N. Brown, Locus Magazine



“The amazing and erotic adventures of the most beautiful courtesan in tomorrow’s universe” 

– Frederik Pohl



“The best single example of prostitution used in fantasy is Janet Morris’ Silistra series… Estri’s character is most like that of Ishtar who describes herself as “‘a prostitute compassionate am I'” because she “symbolizes the creative submission to the demands of instinct, to the chaos of nature …the free woman, as opposed to the domesticated woman”. Linking Estri with these lunar and water symbols is not difficult because of the moon’s eternal virginity (the strength of integrity) links with her changeability (the prostitute’s switching of lovers). […]

Morris strengthens the moon imagery by having Estri as a well-keepress because wells, fountains, and the moon as the orb which controls water have long been associated with fertility, […] In a sense, she is like the moon because she is apparently eternal, never waxing or waning except in her pursuit of the quest; she is the prototypical wanderer like the moon and Ishtar. She is the eternal night symbol of the moon in opposition to the Day-Keepers […]

 At her majority (her three hundredth birthday), she is given a silver-cubed hologram letter from her mother, containing a videotape of her conception by the savage bronzed barbarian god from another world. […] If Estri’s mother then acts as a bawd, willing her lineage as Well-Keepress to her daughter, then Estri’s great-grandmother Astria as foundress of the Well becomes a further mother-bawd figure when she offers her prophetic advice in her letter: “Guard Astria for you may lose it, and more. Beware of one who is not as he seems. Stray not in the port city of Baniev …look well about you, for your father’s daughter’s brother seeks you”. Having no brother that she knows of does not stay Estri from undertaking the heroic quest of finding her father.”

 – Anne K. Kaler, The Picara: From Hera to Fantasy Heroine

 

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I am Estri Hadrath diet Estrazi, former Well-Keepress of Astria on the planet Silistra. I have begun three times to tell this story, and three times I have been interrupted. This, then, the fourth attempt, will surely prove successful.

Perhaps you have heard of Silistra, the planet that was catalyst to the sexual revolution in the year twenty-two thousand, seven hundred and four Bipedal Federate Standard Time, or of the Silistran serums that lengthen life and restore vitality in virtually any bipedal life form, or perhaps you have at some time contracted the services of a Silistran telepath, or a precognitive, or a deep reader. It is possible that you have in your own home the scintillating, indestructible web-cloth woven by our domestic arachnids, or have seen holograms of our golachits, those intelligent builder-beetles who exude from their mouths a translucent, superhard substance called gol and create from this gol, under the guidance of the chit-guards, the formidable and resplendent structures in which we live and work.

And perhaps you have seen no web-cloth, no gol, never been ill, and are not interested in sex. If so, you may never have heard of Silistra.

I carry Silistra in my mind’s eye, here under this alien sun. In my mind alone can I look out the east window of my beloved exercise hall in Well Astria and see the sun’s rising burst upon the jewel-like towers and keeps of the Inner Well and a thousand rainbows arc and dance in the greening sky.



Best selling author Janet Morris began writing in 1976 and published more than 30 novels, many co-authored with her husband Chris Morris or others. She contributed short fiction to the shared universe fantasy series Thieves World, in which she created the Sacred Band of Stepsons, a mythical unit of ancient fighters modeled on the Sacred Band of Thebes. She created, orchestrated, and edited the Bangsian fantasy series Heroes in Hell, writing stories for the series as well as co-writing the related novel, The Little Helliad, with Chris Morris. She wrote the bestselling Silistra Quartet in the 1970s, including High Couch of Silistra, The Golden Sword, Wind from the Abyss, and The Carnelian Throne. This quartet had more than four million copies in Bantam print alone, and was translated into German, French, Italian, Russian and other languages. In the 1980s, Baen Books released a second edition of this landmark series. The third edition is the Author’s Cut edition, newly revised by the author for Perseid Press. Most of her fiction work has been in the fantasy and science fiction genres, although she has also written historical and other novels. Morris has written, contributed to, or edited several book-length works of non-fiction, as well as papers and articles on nonlethal weapons, developmental military technology and other defense and national security topics.

Janet said: ‘People often ask what book to read first. I recommend “I, the Sun” if you like ancient history; “The Sacred Band,” a novel, if you like heroic fantasy; “Lawyers in Hell” if you like historical fantasy set in hell; “Outpassage” if you like hard science fiction; “High Couch of Silistra” if you like far-future dystopian or philosophical novels. I am most enthusiastic about the definitive Perseid Press Author’s Cut editions, which I revised and expanded.’

  

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