Sunday Surprise!

Vampire Haiku by Ryan Mecum

You hold in your hands a recently discovered poetry journal—the poetry journal of a vampire. William Butten was en route to a new land on the Mayflower when he was turned into a vampire by a fellow passenger, a beautiful woman named Katherine. These pages contain his heartbreaking story—the story of a vampire who has lived through (and perhaps caused) some of America’s defining events. As he travels the country and as centuries pass, he searches for his lost love and records his adventures and misadventures using the form of poetry known as haiku.

As Butten documents bloody wars, a certain tea party in Boston, living the high life during the Great Depression, two Woodstock festivals, the corruption of Emily Dickinson, and hanging out with Davy Crockett, he keeps to the classic 5-7-5 syllable structure of haiku. The resulting poems are hilarious, repulsive, oddly romantic, and bizarre.

Read along, and you just may find a new appreciation for—and insight into—various events in American history. And blood.

Clockwork and Corsets by Regina Riley (to be released by Lyrical Press, but I haven’t been able to find anything else but what you see here.  I do however love the cover.)

The Merry Widow, airship for hire, sails the skies in search of employment and adventure. But good paying jobs are few and far between for the all female crew, until opportunity knocks in the most unlikely of forms; a fetch and deliver mission for the notorious Madame Ruby. Join Captain Rose Madigan as she leads her ladies into the thick of a merciless jungle, in search of a missing mad scientist’s abandoned laboratory and the wondrous booty within. What they find, or rather who, not only changes the entire course of the Widow but also captures the affections of her newest recruit, Gabriella Upstairs. Will this stranger bring more trouble than Rose can handle? Or will he prove to win more than just Gabriella’s heart?

Vampires, Wine and Roses by John Richard Stephens, Vince Locke (Illustrator)

Seductive. Immortal. Terrifying.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula may be the most famous vampire story of all time, but terrifying tales of strangely alluring, bloodsucking creatures have been around for centuries and appear in the works of many writers not usually associated with the horror genre.In this unique volume, you’ll find a blood-chilling collection of thirty-four literary vampire stories from the greatest writers of all time, including: Anne Rice, William Shakespeare, Edgar Allan Poe, Woody Allen, Bram Stoker, H.G. Wells, Rod Serling, Alexandre Dumas, Robert Louis Stevenson, Lenny Bruce, Edith Wharton, H.P. Lovecraft and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle