The Duke in His Castle

THE DUKE IN HIS CASTLE by Nebula Award-nominated author and award-winning artist Vera Nazarian is a dark lush erotic fantasy novella in the vein of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast with interior illustrations by the author. <p>Rossian the young Duke of Violet wastes away in mad solitude unable to leave the confines of his decadent castle grounds because of a mysterious invisible barrier...until a strange female intruder arrives at the castle bearing a box of bones. <p>Vera Nazarian combines the wry and poignant charm of Hans Christian Andersen with the subversive wallop of Angela Carter in crafting this gem of a fairy tale. No longer merely a promising writer Nazarian has arrived. <br>--Paul Witcover <p>Vera Nazarian is a writer seemingly so full of story that it just comes bubbling uncontrollably out of her... The Duke in his Castle shows her at the peak of her form in a deceptively simple tale that probes the nature of life and death of power and succumbing and ultimately of good and both the evils-active evil and the evil born from apathy. <br>--John Grant Co-Editor of <i>The Encyclopedia of Fantasy</i>