Paranormal Romance – Page 4

Interview: Isabelle Adler

Let’s welcome Isabelle Adler to the blog today to talk about her recent release and answer some nosey questions!

I’m very happy to be here today to talk about my newest release, The House on Druid Lake. It’s a Halloween-themed M/M romance, sweet and emotional with just a tiny bit of spooky thrown into the mix, which I believe is the perfect fit for the autumn season. The story follows Oliver Foster, an aspiring young architect embarking on a successful career in Baltimore, who rents an apartment in an old Victorian house overlooking Baltimore’s Druid Lake. As he gradually meets his quirky neighbours and develops feelings for Nym, his enigmatic, gruff landlord, Oliver becomes convinced there is more going on at Lakeside Lodge than meets the eye, and Halloween might be just the right (or the wrong) time to unearth some supernatural secrets.

Where do you write?

I’m very lucky to have my own little writing nook with a built-in desk and shelves. It’s not very private, but I rely on my noise-cancelling headphones to filter the sounds of a busy household when I want to focus on my work. Sometimes, when I feel I need an even quieter space and a change of scenery, I take my laptop to a coffee shop or a library.

What do you like to read?

I used to read across different genres of speculative fiction (sci-fi, fantasy, historical adventure), but in the recent years I almost exclusively read romance, leaning heavily into queer romance. What can I say, with the world being currently the mess that it is, I feel like I need the assurance of a happy ending in my reading. Besides, the romance genre, and even LGBTQ romance in particular, is so broad, encompassing every kind of plot and setup one could wish for – mystery, paranormal, historical, etc. – that I’m never stuck for choice, depending on my mood and current interests. In my writing, I also dabble in a variety of different subgenres, which allows for a larger creative freedom.

Writing is an intrinsically solo occupation. Do you belong to any groups or associations, either online or in the ‘real’ world? How does that work for you?

I don’t currently belong to any writer groups, though I know authors who absolutely swear by them. I’m a very private and solitary person, and I’m rather shy when it comes to talking about myself or asking for opinions about my work – and I’m even worse about offering my opinion to others, unless specifically asked to do so. I tend to let ideas percolate in my brain until I feel they’re ready to become stories, and then it’s all about fleshing them out on my own.

That being said, I really enjoy interacting with readers and other authors on Twitter, sharing snippets of works in progress and bits of inspiration. That has become a huge part of my author experience, and I’m very glad that modern social media (as bad as it can be sometimes in other respects) has allowed me to be a part of a large writing community.

Tell me a little bit about your most recent release. What gave you the idea for it? How long did it take to write? What did you enjoy about writing it? What did you hate?

My recent release is called The House on Druid Lake. It’s a Halloween-themed M/M romance, published October 4^th, 2021, with NineStar Press. I simply adore holiday romances, and have written several stories centred around Christmas in the recent years, but I’ve always wanted to write a Halloween story. I’m not a huge horror fan, so I aimed for it to be more comedically spooky than truly scary. I had this initial idea about an old house inhabited by strange and mysterious creatures that are doing their best to blend in with human society (not always successfully), and it all developed from there. The thing is, because of my busy schedule, I didn’t have a lot of time to draft it before the fall release, so I had to complete the entire thing in about three months, which is an incredibly tight timeline for me! It was difficult, but also fun and challenging, and certainly made for an interesting experience. Still, I think I wouldn’t choose to work on such deadlines again!

The House on Druid Lake

A new city, a new job, a new home—things are definitely looking up for Oliver Foster. An aspiring young architect, embarking on a successful career in Baltimore, all he wants is to put the pain of a broken heart and broken trust behind him. The last thing he needs is another ill-advised romantic entanglement. But despite his best intentions, Oliver can’t help his growing fascination with Nym Brown, the mysterious owner of Lakeside Lodge.

When Oliver rents an apartment in an old Victorian house overlooking Baltimore’s Druid Lake, he expects it to be quaint and shabbily charming. But as Halloween draws near and all things spooky come out to play, Oliver becomes convinced there is more going on at Lakeside Lodge than meets the eye, aside from the faulty plumbing. His neighbours are a whole new definition of quirky, and his enigmatic, gruff landlord is both intimidating and dangerously attractive.

Dark and sinister secrets lurk behind the house on Druid Lake’s crumbling façade. Unearthing them might yet put Oliver’s future—and his heart—on the line.

Buy from Nine Star Press : Amazon US : Amazon UK : Kobo : B&N : Add on Goodreads

Meet Isabelle

A voracious reader from the age of five, Isabelle Adler has always dreamed of one day putting her own stories into writing. She loves traveling, art, and science, and finds inspiration in all of these. Her favorite genres include sci-fi, fantasy, and historical adventure. She also firmly believes in the unlimited powers of imagination and caffeine.

Email : Twitter : Website : Goodreads : Amazon

Ouija Boards in the post-WW1 period

The plot of The Quid Pro Quo features a Ouija Board session that causes stuff to happen. I thought I knew all about them, but when I came to do a bit of research into what my 1920s characters would have known and thought about them, it turns out I didn’t know as much as I thought.

Vintage Ouija Boards (downloadable from etsy)

Ouija boards are an ancient way of contacting spirits, appropriated and twisted by the western world from another culture that uses them responsibly as part of their spiritual practice, right?

(Imagine a gong ringing here, if you would)

Wrong! Wrong in all the ways!

The roots of the Ouija Board lie in the mid-Western state of Ohio in the 1880s. Their use wasn’t at all incompatible with Christianity and grew out of the interest in Spiritualism that swept across the US after the Fox Sisters in New York State became a national sensation in the 1840s. After the Civil War, the US was in collective mourning for a long time. Having an easier way to talk to the spirits of loved ones rather than being dependent on a medium was presumably how the concept of a board and planchette arrangement originally came about.

In the 1890s the idea was picked up by a couple of smart businessmen, who set up the Kennard Novelty Company in Maryland to manufacture a ‘talking board’ as a parlour game. The name Ouija came from the sister-in-law of one of them, Helen Peters. She was a medium and the name came to her during a session with the ‘talking board’ itself. The spirit she was speaking with told her it meant ‘good luck’. However…at the time of the communication, Peters said she was wearing a locket with the picture and name of the novelist Ouida*. Make of that what you will!

Interest in both Spiritualism and the Ouija waxed and waned over the next two or three decades. Then in short order the world was hit by 1914-1918 world war and the 1918 influenza pandemic. Millions of people died and there was an explosion of interest in the ostensible comforts offered by talking to the dead.

So, at the time my story is set, talking to dead people and to a lesser extent communicating with spirits and angels and entities was a perfectly respectable occupation. Arthur Conan Doyle was a great believer in Spiritualism and Queen Victoria is said to have held several seances to attempt to contact Prince Albert. The Ouija Board even featured in this 1920 Norman Rockwell picture on the front of The Saturday Evening Post. The ladies in The Quid Pro Quo are divided between being fully invested in the process as a method of contacting their beloved dead; and finding it all rather inappropriate and ridiculous. But no-one is really worried about it in the sense that we are now, when we tend to associate Ouija Boards with demonic forces.

So…what changed? Well, in 1973, The Exorcist was released. It completely shifted the way the Ouija was perceived and they are now viewed in pop culture as something that can really harm people, either psychologically or by summoning evil spirits, depending on ones viewpoint.

You can read more about the history of the Ouija Board here at The Smithsonian Magazine . The Quid Pro Quo is coming out on 20th November.

*I hadn’t come across Ouida before. She’s amazing!

British Accents now and then

One of the things I love about working with Callum Hale on my audiobooks is his ability to throw himself into pretty much any British accent and bring the character to life. To my British ear each of the people I’ve created sound exactly as I’ve envisaged them as he brings them off the page.

I asked him to make Rob, from Inheritance of Shadows ‘less ooh-arr’ and he toned the accent down so to me at least, Rob doesn’t sound so much like a heavy-handed son of the Somerset soil. And I wanted Will Grant in the 1920s London Trilogy to sound more like Lord Peter Wimsey. Callum obliged, perfectly. (These are my two favourite of all my characters, ever, incidentally).

The question I’m always asking myself about my writing though, is how right can I get it? I want the history in my books to be accurate, unless I’m deliberately twisting the universe out of true with magic. I think this is the same question historians have to ask themselves about looking at anything in the past. We are both looking at things through our own rose-tinted spectacles, coloured with our own experiences and social expectations. My characters in these books grew up in Victorian England. What did they really think about the Empire? What did they talk about in the pub? What did they really sound like? How did they really smell? We’re fudging it, the whole lot. Historians and archaeologists because of lack of data. And writers because of lack of data and because we don’t want our main characters to be unsympathetic to modern audiences.

Anyway…during one or other of my late-night sessions randomly browsing the web, I came across this programme about Edwardian accents. A regional English language specialist in Germany during the First World War, a real-life Professor Higgins, suddenly realised he had a huge pool of untapped research material in the German army’s British prisoners of war. In this documentary you can actually listen to their voices.

I was very interested in how the modern specialists in the programme say the regional accents of the past are broader in the recordings than they are now. It’s as if the rising tide of London-speak has swept the broad vowels of the regional accents back from the centre of the country, into the more remote west of England. So although to me, Rob sounds about right, a farm labourer from Somerset who’s self-educated and likes to read, to his contemporaries he’d probably have sounded out of place. You can listen to Callum’s reading of him here, in the first chapter of Inheritance of Shadows.

I think, listening to those long-ago voices in the programme, it’s important to remember these men were prisoners. That’s one of the filters we mustn’t discard. Were they doing this work in the language lab out of the kindness of their hearts? Because they were bored and wanted an occupation? Because they were threatened in to it? Because they were offered extra rations or privileges? Are these their actual accents? Or are they performative, a joke on the professor? They’re immensely touching, whatever their origin and I hope you enjoy it.

You can buy the 1920s London audiobooks at Authors Direct.

Lost in Time, Shadows on the Border, The Hunted and the Hind by A. L. Lester. Narrated by Callum Hale.

Announcing The Quid Pro Quo

So, here’s some news! The Quid Pro Quo will be out on the 20th November and here’s the cover and an excerpt!

It’s the second in the Bradfield trilogy following The Fog of War and stars Walter, Sylvia’s nurse-friend; and Simon, a local detective who visits Bradfield to investigate a murder.

The Quid Pro Quo

Village nurse Walter Kennett is content with his makeshift found-family in tiny Bradfield. However one midsummer morning a body is found floating in the village duck pond, dead by magical means.
Detective Simon Frost arrives in Bradfield to investigate a inexplicable murder. The evidence seems to point to Lucille Hall-Bridges, who lives with doctor Sylvia Marks and nurse Walter Kennett at Courtfield House. Simon isn’t happy—he doesn’t believe Lucy is a murderer but he’s sure the three of them are hiding something. In the meantime, the draw he feels toward Walter takes him by surprise.

Walter is in a dilemma, concealing Sylvia and Lucy’s relationship and not knowing how much to tell Frost about the paranormal possibilities of the murder. He isn’t interested in going to bed with anyone—he’s got a complicated life and has to know someone really well before he falls between the sheets. He’s taken aback by his own attraction to Detective Frost and angry when Frost appears to twist the spark between them to something transactional in nature.

Will Walter be satisfied to stay on the periphery of Lucy and Sylvia’s love affair, a welcome friend but never quite included? Or is it time for him to strike out and embark on a relationship of his own?

The second in the Bradfield trilogy, set in the Border Magic universe. With a transm/m couple. Read The Fog of War first and/or add The Quid Pro Quo to Goodreads.

As Simon was replacing the device on the telephone table a pretty young woman put her head out of a door at toward the end of the hall. “Sylv!” she said, “Do you want tea? I’ve boiled the kettle.” and then when she realised he wasn’t who she thought he was, “Oh, I do beg your pardon! I thought you were Dr Marks!”.

“She’s still in the surgery,” Simon nodded across the hall.

The woman emerged into the hall. “Lucille Hall-Bridges,” she said, extending a hand. “I’m a friend of Sylvia’s. I help with the house.”

Simon took her hand in his. Her grip was sure and warm. “Detective Frost,” he replied. “Nice to meet you, Miss Hall-Bridges. She had a recent bruise running from her jaw to just below her eye, entering the black-and-purple stage.

“I’ve made a pot of tea,” she was saying. “I don’t know whether anyone will want any, but I do like to feel useful and tea is so…normal-making, isn’t it?”

He nodded, slightly bemused at her chatter. “Yes, indeed,” he said. “Very normal.”

She gave a perfunctory tap on the surgery door, opened it and disappeared inside without waiting for a response. “Sylv, Walter, I’ve made tea. Would you and your detective like to come into the drawing room?” Her voice faded, presumably as she joined them in the examination room.

There was a pause. Then, “Oh!” he heard her say. “Oh.” She sounded a little shocked. “What’s happened to her hands?” she asked.

“Scraped on the bottom on the pond I think,” Simon heard Dr Marks say. “She was face-down in the water.”

“Oh.” Miss Hall-Bridges’ voice was small. “Sylvia…there’s…she’s…I can feel…do you think…?” Her voice trailed off and Dr Marks spoke over her, clearly away they might be overhead.

“Let’s not worry about that now, shall we? The policeman is sending her down to Taunton to a postmortem. You go and take the tea-things into the drawing room. We’ll just cover her up.”

The Quid Pro Quo by A. L. Lester. Trans MC, historical, paranormal, 1920s England.

#AmReading

This week, two gay romances, one fantasy, one contemporary, and a contemporary fantasy story with roots set deep in English myth.

Seducing the Sorcerer by Lee Welch

Cover, Seducing the Sorcerer, Lee Welch.

There’s a magic horse that eats eiderdowns. That’s all you should need to know in order to one-click this book. Go and get it now. Immediately.

Other than that…it’s just as beautifully written as Lee Welch’s previous books. The characters are complex and well drawn–Fenn, who’s POV we follow–is an older character in his mid-forties and has fallen on hard times. He’s at the end of his rope when he gets swindled by a farmer he does some work for and is paid with a sackcloth horse. After that his life gets extremely weird.

I loved this whole premise. Fenn is just such a good character. He’s likeable, he’s realistic in that he tries to do the right thing and doesn’t always quite manage it. He makes assumptions and he acts on the spur of the moment and he is tired of fighting for things. He’s also seriously freaked out by magic. The world-building is wonderful–the magic system is there in the background and we pick it up as we go along rather than it being spoon-fed to us. This is my bag, as you are probably aware. The slow-burn romance between Fenn and Morgrim the sorcerer is very well paced and there are political machinations going on behind the scenes that gradually become clear to both the reader and Fenn. I loved their relationship dynamic. Hard recommend!

The Salisbury Key by Harper Fox (audio)

Cover, audiobook, Harper Fox, The Salisbury Key

There’s a lot of pain in this story. Warnings for suicide, grief and the trauma that falls out from them. It’s a long time since I read it and because the audio is much slower than I read myself, I think the grief had much more impact on me. Dan is devastated when his older partner kills himself, and sets himself to find out why through the haze of emotion and guilt he’s surrounded by. He meets a young soldier, Rain, who he has an instant connection with and together they open a can of worms containing biological weapons and evil. It’s a bit of an odd mixture with the archaeology thread, but it works really well and it’s a favourite of mine. The narration is perfect. I loved Rain’s voice in particular. Recommend.

The Green Man’s Heir by Juliet E. McKenna

I came across this via a twitter rec and it’s glorious. The MC is the son of a dryad and a human. He can see supernatural creatures but is not one himself…dryad’s sons are long lived and heal easily, but only their daughters are actual dryads. Our hero, Dan, is an itinerant carpenter, vaguely searching for other men like him–he wants to learn how they cope with living in a modern age of computer ID and registration when they don’t age as swiftly as humans. He has dreams that he interprets as messages from the Green Man, guiding him here and there across the country. In Derbyshire, he stumbles onto a murder that turns out to have a supernatural element and becomes involved with a local estate that has a dragon problem. This is a first in series and I’m about to begin the second. It’s lovely writing…rooted in the countryside and in English myth with likeable, rich characters that kept me turning the pages. Highly recommend.

That’s it for this week!