Dawn Song

A modern dark fantasy classic returns with this new, Special Edition of Dawn Song, the soul-haunting novel from a Bram Stoker Award-winning author with a deeply powerful-and prescient-vision. Set in Boston at the start of the First Gulf War, a larger, supernatural battle for Supremacy in Hell takes shape . . . but plays out on a personal scale as unassuming humans careen into the path of a beautiful, terrible Succubus who has come to Earth to do her Father's bidding. Lawrence, a lonely book clerk, new to Boston, is just one wanting soul in a city full of them. His deepest desires call out to someone . . . anyone. But who will answer among the faceless crowds? A grieving son, a theology student tormented by doubt, the faithful, the mad: all are touched by the divine as the Succubus, who is both ancient and newborn, falls in love with the city even as she reaps the souls of her lovers. Her journey through our world comes at an unimaginable price. For in Hell, two powerful deities have awakened to use mankind as pawns in a monstrous conflict that will change the nature of damnation itself. In the iconic horror tradition of Clive Barker and Anne Rice, as well as of newer fantasy voices like Mike Carey and Tim Powers, Dawn Song is a dark meditation on Salvation, full of terror and tenderness.

William Peter Blatty, author of The Exorcist

“It put me in mind of Anne Rice.”

Library Journal

“Juxtaposes scene of hauntingly perverse beauty with vignettes of stark and grotesque horror in this compelling and disturbing tale of occult warfare and transcendent faith.”

Tananarive Due, American Book-Award winning author of Blood Colony, The Living Blood and My Soul to Keep

“Michael Marano is a writer’s writer, and Stories from the Plague Years is a haunting tour of Marano’s fierce imagination. This collection is the perfect combination of lush writing, memorable characters, and stories served raw.”

About the Author

Former punk rock DJ, bouncer, male model, and radio producer Michael Marano is a horror, dark fantasy and science fiction writer, with works in anthologies such as The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 11 and Outsiders: 22 All-New Stories from the Edge. His first novel, Dawn Song garnered the Bram Stoker and International Horror Guild awards. Stories From the Plague Years, a collection of Marano’s new and reprinted short fiction, was named one of the Top Ten Horror releases of 2011 by Booklist. His novella Displacement was nominated for a 2011 Shirley Jackson Award. Since 1990, he has been reviewing movies for the Public Radio Satellite System program Movie Magazine International, produced in San Francisco and syndicated in more than 111 markets in the U.S. and Canada. He teaches at Grub Street, a non-profit creative writing centre.

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