Fruit of the Deceiver and Forty Hands of Night, 2nd Edition Omnibus Collection

2016, 454 pages

According to the travelling doctor Abd al-Latif, in the year 1201, the old, the young and the fat were devoured by fellow Egyptians in a cannibalistic hunt that lasted a year and annihilated entire communities.

The causes remain unknown.

The forces of evil unleashed by this horrible feast remain unknown.

The Jericho Bone tells the Good Doctor’s tale and suggests answers to the unanswerable through the eyes of an ancient tribal general, a bloody-handed envoy of the Caliph, a fisherman, four doctors, a bookseller, a donkey boy, a slave girl sold for her flesh rather than her companionship, a ruthless adventurer, a loquacious midwife, a wicked noblewoman, and a wet nurse attempting to save the last baby in Cairo from those who would dine upon the innocent.

Of a Sword and a Sorcerer

At Dusk I Fell

2019, 119 pages

Dust Cover to Yusef of the Dusk

At Dusk I fell. Under the waving fronds, at the cool water’s edge, the monkeys that spoke lured

me into her beguiling embrace. Crept upon in the gathering gloom, I faltered before her oval-eyed glare.

The hand, you wonder, weird-worker, that brought me to this tomb of despair?

No red hand of man felled Yusef bin Yiju—not on your sissy divan had I been

bred, but on the hard-sorrow bones of a murdered land. It was a kiss that covered me in dread, the soul-drinking candle that flickered behind her alabaster mask, a mask with batting lashes, twinkling nose, creased cheek, and pouting lips—a mask that lived, as the serpent lives, on those betrayed by

hypnotized eyes.

Death came softly welcome to my forge door, seething up from the moist earth, worms of dissolution to pick the sorrowful flesh from stilled bone.

Then did she rise in the sky, whore of all, mistress of the night, the slithering world bloomed awful in her light.

Whence came you—ghoul of souls—clay shade pot in hand, weird words on lip, so saying I should go if I but let you know?

Know what, weird-worker, under this glowering moon—how I came here or why your dainty hide should quiver in fear?

2017, 157 pages

What if our nightmares, myths, devils and demons had a singular source, a source so advanced as to be as a scientist to our bacteria, so alien as to be unable to communicate with us, without becoming us?

A possible answer to these disturbing questions may be found in James LaFond’s Drink Deep of Night, a tale told in that place where wonder and horror meet in the mind.

Formerly titled The Song of Jeannot: Tales of the Secret Gardiner

Portions of this work appear in, Ire and Ice, The Jericho Bone, Dream Flower and Hemavore.

Winter and A White Christmas

2016, 2010 pages

Ire an Ice is a brutal science-fiction adventure spanning over 70,000 years. From Ice Age Europe, to Celtic Ireland, the Early American Frontier, an East Baltimore Diner and a West Baltimore Liquor Store, characters as diverse as a homeless American man, a ruthless Roman centurian, a Shawnee warrior, an EMT and a ten-year-old gangbanger, are confronted with an ancient and terrible secret.

Includes the Second Edition of the novella Winter and the addendum novelette A White Christmas.

A Biography of a Mythic King

2019, 86 pages

Considering the Careers of Robert E. Howard’s Mythic Hero Kings as ethnic history channeled through Blood Memory, real-life barbarian, James LaFond, at the suggestion of a reader, spent a week using the advent of a rare fever to try and channel Howard biographer and posthumous collaborator L. Sprague de Camp to interview the essence of a heroized Dark Age ghost descended from the ancient Sons of Aryas…