18+ Stephen King’s The Gunslinger meets Breaking Bad in Laura Bickle’s novel Dark Alchemy.
Some secrets are better left buried…
Geologist Petra Dee arrives in Wyoming looking for clues to her father’s disappearance years before. What she finds instead is Temperance, a dying Western town with a gold rush past and a meth-infested present.
Some secrets are better left buried…
Geologist Petra Dee arrives in Wyoming looking for clues to her father’s disappearance years before. What she finds instead is Temperance, a dying Western town with a gold rush past and a meth-infested present.
But under the town’s dust and quiet, an old power is shifting. When bodies start turning up - desiccated and twisted skeletons that Petra can’t scientifically explain - her investigations land her in the middle of a covert war between the town’s most powerful interests. Petra’s father wasn’t the only one searching for the alchemical secrets of Temperance, and those still looking are now ready to kill.
Armed with nothing but shaky alliances, a pair of antique guns, and a relic she doesn’t understand, the only thing Petra knows for sure is that she and her coyote sidekick are going to have to move fast, or die next.
GUEST POST
Why the West is Weird
The West is a weird place.
There’s a lot of mythology about the Wild West that sinks into storytelling. The mysterious stranger comes to town, and whispers follow the stranger’s arrival. Cattle barons gaze out on broad, uninhabited vistas. A guy with a badge opposes a man in black. There are tense standoffs with guns, and nobody knows who’s the fastest draw until blood spills in the street. The Wild West is an iconic legendary framework, and mysterious all on its own.
I wanted to add to that mystery, to make it even weirder.
DARK ALCHEMY begins with a stranger coming to town. Petra Dee is a geologist, running away from her own personal demons, searching for her father who disappeared in the sleepy town of Temperance a decade ago. She’s determined to explain all the weirdness she encounters with a scientist’s detachment, refusing to believe the supernatural events unfolding around her.
She acquires a spirit guide – a coyote who’s dug up a mysterious golden compass and hangs around her trailer for the opportunity to pick through her groceries. The compass is a relic from the town’s gold rush days, when Temperance was flush with gold conjured by an alchemist. The town’s legacy has endured through a descendent of the original alchemist…but instead of conjuring gold, Stroud cooks meth. Stroud commands an army of strung-out minions who carry out his will in exchange for his newest drug, the Elixir. And Stroud wants what Petra has – the golden artifact from his great-great grandfather with its own magical powers.
Stroud’s at war with Sal Rutherford, the local cattle baron. Rutherford runs the cops like he runs the ranch, with practiced ruthlessness. His secret police are the Hanged Men, a silent group of undead ranch hands who are always in the company of raven familiars. Gabe, a man in a black hat, is the leader of the Hanged Men, ever-alert for an opportunity to overthrow Rutherford and gain control of the source of the Hanged Men’s power: the Alchemical Tree of Life.
Petra has been advised by the welcome wagon – a Yellowstone forest ranger wearing a shiny star badge that he takes very seriously – to get some guns. As she picks up a set of antique pistols, she finds herself drawing down on the Hanged Men, dodging meth heads, and trying to pick apart the mystery of grotesquely calcinated bodies turning up in Temperance and the nearby Yellowstone Park. Something unearthly has gotten loose, and Petra will have to muster all her scientific training and all her courage in order to stop it. That is, when her presumed-dead father isn’t trying to communicate from the afterworld through her truck radio.
The West is weird. And I want to see how much weirder it can get. I hope you’ll join me.
About the author:
Laura Bickle grew up in rural Ohio, reading entirely too many comic books out loud to her favorite Wonder Woman doll. After graduating with an MA in Sociology – Criminology from Ohio State University and an MLIS in Library Science from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, she patrolled the stacks at the public library and worked with data systems in criminal justice. She now dreams up stories about the monsters under the stairs, also writing contemporary fantasy novels under the name Alayna Williams.
Her work has been included in the ALA’s Amelia Bloomer Project 2013 reading list and the State Library of Ohio’s Choose to Read Ohio reading list for 2015-2016. THE HALLOWED ONES and THE OUTSIDE are her latest young adult novels.
2 comments:
Thanks so much for hosting this book! I don't think I ever would've looked beyond the cover if I came across it on Amazon or something. You just don't expect alchemy and the Wild West together, and I don't read Westerns. The 'Alchemy' part of the title with the cover just made me think of people changing or something. But the fact that there is supernatural to this, I'd love to read it. Very interesting.
Thank you so much for hosting me today!
smiles, this was a lot of fun to write - alchemy is one of my favorite topics. I was thrilled to finally have a chance to really explore it!
Post a Comment