'On the Nature of the Gods.' Excerpt.

Hope Ng baked in the hot sun, rising ever higher in the desert sky. Tied with rawhide thongs at ankles and wrists, scratched, bruised and with her clothes half torn off, the raven-haired Hope prayed for a miracle.

Deep in her heart lurked despair, for persistent struggles in the chill dawn hours had convinced her escape was impossible. Nearby, the thin tendril of smoke and rank smell of the fire was the only trace left behind by the war party.

As the shadows shortened, the first pangs of real thirst came, and she knew dread. She was going to die out here, never mind the carnage that had once been a peaceful train of settlers heading to a better life. It was all gone now, with clumps of bodies, families and individuals still recognizable in the stiffened attitudes of death. Most of the long line of wagons still smoldered.

Overhead, ominous black shapes circled, the long tip feathers trembling, always seeking an easy way. Their bony nostrils would be flaring in excitement, heads craning to take in the scene and the forms below.

It wouldn’t be long now, and they would come down. They would land within fifty yards, maybe closer. Then the awkward, half-hopping, half-sideways shuffle would begin. They would screw up their courage. They would look her over carefully. Their desperation for a meal and simple competition against their peers would embolden them. They might start on the dead first, but sooner or later she would be food for the vultures.

It would be better if she died of thirst or starvation first.

Somewhere nearby a hoof clinked against stone, a tiny, insignificant sound, but one out of place in a country still quiet after a windless dawn.

Hope’s heart thudded at the thought of them coming back to take care of some unfinished business.

Again it came, the strike of bone on rock, as two small birds in a scraggly bush in her peripheral vision dropped out of the thin foliage and fluttered away, towards the sun and into deeper shadows.

“Who’s there?” she called in an agony of suspense.

She prayed they would just kill her quickly and have done with it…

There was a faint but guttural grunt and several thuds came through the sand under her back, but she could hear little over the soughing of a rising breeze. Hot, sharp grains of sand stung her cheek, wet with fresh tears.

A hoarse breath, sounding wet and thick, came from right behind her head where she couldn’t see it, no matter how she twisted her neck and shoulders.

“Oh, my God,” she said.

Was she to be eaten by a Grizzly or a big cat? Her mind worked frantically to analyze the sounds. She sobbed in fear and frustration, yanking to and fro in fury, in one last forlorn attempt to break free. A horse blew, and a long dark shadow fell over her face, revealing in black silhouette the head and forequarters of the animal, one with a halter and a patch of white on the forehead.

“Ah!” she breathed.

She fell back on the sand exhausted again.

“Howdy, ma’am,” said a deep male voice, cultured and somehow unsullied by the twang and drawl of the typical Southern male. It was an honest voice, a good voice.

Leather creaked and another shadow fell across her as she looked up at her saviour in relief and a special kind of pleading humility.

“They give you a rough time, ma’am?” he asked, and she finally got a glimpse of his face.

She gazed breathlessly into kindly blue-black eyes, unusually large and expressive, tall and broad-shouldered as he was. The big fellow took off his hat, revealing a widow’s peak, and long dark hair sweeping out like the waves from the front of a windjammer. He mopped his brow with a blue and white paisley bandanna, carefully replacing his headgear.

“It—it was horrid,” she said. “Oh, thank God you’re here!”

“Indians are smelly, beastly creatures,” he advised, kneeling close and raising a canteen to her lips, the canvas cover delightfully cool and wet on her sternum, still heaving with exertion and emotion.

He dribbled cool, cleansing water on her lips and she tasted it greedily.

“They killed everyone, men, women and children,” she said in a gush of release. “They tied me up and were fondling me, and kissing me, and touching me. I think I belonged to one of them. Or rather two of them had a share in me, or it might have been a lot worse.”

“Yes, the other ones would have to show at least some respect for the property of a chief,” he said. “They was probably just funnin’ with you, ma’am.”

At the time, she was sure they were going to do it. What had gotten into their heads, to make them just break camp like that and go madly riding off was a mystery she had no interest in solving. Her head thudded back down into the sand. She lay there breathing quietly in a state of near-bliss.

'On the Nature of the Gods' is available from Barnes & Noble.   Blurb: Jeb is one of the toughest men alive, and he demands respect. After a personal humiliation at the hands of the New York City cops, he sets out on a trail of vengeance. In company with his intuitive horse Rooster, it leads him to the evil Dr. Schmitt-Rottluff, the gaslight era's virtuoso of illicit cloning and mind-bending manipulation of the human genome.

Coming Soon. 'On the Nature of the Gods.'

Photo: Morguefile, design by Louis.

Here is the blurb for 'On the Nature of the Gods,' scheduled for release March 31.


Rife with the bizarre juxtaposition of psycho-sexual elements, ‘On the Nature of the Gods’ is a superb parody of the steam-punk weird western with elements of bedroom comedy sub-sub-genre. Undefeated in a hundred and thirty-eight bouts, bare-knuckle fighter Jeb Snead may be the toughest man in a totally plastic world. Unfortunately, he has no sense of humour and might even be a little insecure. Rufe Golan is the son of a rich man, a smooth-talking bastard and an inveterate foot-fetishist. Yet he knows what he likes. Hope Ng, starved for either attention or entertainment, is on her way to San Francisco to live with her scruffy old grandfather when her wagon train is massacred. Things get better after that. The buxom but leggy Miss Muriel Kitty, a professional working woman-cat-thing, and wise in the ways of the world, provides a valuable service in the frontier society of which she is a part. The Evil Doctor Schmitt-Rottluff surrounds himself with willing tools and useful fools, some of whom are the product of a little too much inbreeding in test-tubes. Chapley, his alleged black nephew and Waylon, his acknowledged ‘taurian son, Nazi gryphons, erudite Injuns who read Latin and mischievous spirits who just want to see what happens next, fill out a never-before-seen all-star cast in comic genius and Julius Caesar of Canadian novelists Louis B. Shalako’s killer debut in this admittedly obscure literary category. In the words of a beta-reviewer who prefers anonymity (my Uncle Bob,) and who has asked not to be quoted, ‘This is way better than Atlanta Nights.’ And anybody who doesn’t like telempathic horses and equine romance, or casually-stated themes of rape, bestiality and incest, most likely has something wrong with them. Diabolically fun, don’t let your mother catch you reading this one! Seriously, it will probably kill her. Please don’t say you haven’t been warned, because you have.

Excerpt: 'On the Nature of the Gods,' a steampunk weird western.

The following is a scene from what is clearly a very silly book indeed.


After a confab with the equine members of the party, the two men and Hope went back into the hotel. There were a few bleary-eyed patrons in the wide expanse of barroom, but the piano player was slumped across the keys in an alcohol-induced comatose condition. The bartender was nowhere to be seen and Hope wondered if he was asleep on the floor behind the bar. Either that or out in the privy abusing himself, she thought. Gripping the handrail tightly as they made their way up the narrow stairs, she longed for sleep, the last refuge of the truly unhappy.

Her room was first on the right, and she pointedly slammed the door upon entry.

She flung her clothes off, not caring where they landed, and slumped into her lumpy bed, a straw tick of about two and half inches thick, very itchy as all the ones out here were stuffed with bad hay and pinon nuts.

While there was still the distant rumble of talk from below, for the most part silence reigned, and she was just so grateful, no matter how bad the bed. It lasted all of thirty seconds.

A drumming came from the ceiling above. A few seconds later, it came again. After all they had been through! Her first wonder was if someone was trying to get her attention, perhaps in some kind of emergency. Maybe they had fallen and couldn’t get up or something like that.

There was another drumming, a thudding of something hard, and resonant, but of course the floor was just planks. She knew the sounding board of a piano was spruce, right? It made sense.

She knew she would never sleep with all that ruckus going on.

Grinding her teeth, for they had been days passing the Unpainted Desert, a raw, untamed wilderness of gypsum and silica sand, and that damned racket came again. It was all white, hence the name.

“Oh, God, am I tired,” she said aloud in sheer resentment.

Hopefully the idiot could take a hint.

She made a similar observation, only louder this time.

Was it a reporter? Or was it some pimply-faced wannabe pulp fiction author, pounding away at his tripe-writer? Poor fellow! She had some empathy for all of the losers in the galaxy, but she had been averaging three and half hours of sleep per night for about the last ten days or so. The thought that a genetically-modified hammerhead diamondback rattler would sneak under the blankets and then try to crawl up into her puss-puss had kept her tossing and turning all night.

Hopefully, they were a little more scarce here in town, rinky-dink as it was. For some reason it just creeped her out.

Thuds, thuds, thuds…more thuds.

Hope reached under her pillow, and pulled out a 7.63 millimetre German-made Mauser pistol, a long and awkward thing, but deadly enough at close range, and shouted up at the ceiling. She had a spare clip or two under there as well. It was the Turkish export version, given to her as a gift by a love-crazed firearms aficionado. She’d had it anodized a pretty royal blue at a little shop in Greenwich Village. The guy lived at home with his mother and after a while the thing clearly wasn’t going anywhere…

“Let a lady get some sleep down here,” she called in the most commanding voice that a shy, half-naked young mere slip of a woman lying in a bed could generate.

Like the pitter-patter of mules getting at ‘er on a hot tin roof, the danged pounding and stomping came again, with the soft moonlight through the windows illuminating her high cheekbones and wide, sensitive mouth. But her eyes were hard and her lips set tight and firm, like concrete.

Hope emptied the magazine, spraying it back and forth, up and down, carefully peppering the ceiling surface above her with little round black holes. Quickly changing clips, she completed the cross-wise sweep. A cloud of pale smoke hung in the air, her ears rang with the concussion, and a thin haze of dust fell slowly down from above. The thuds and jumps seemed different now, more uneven…something crashed into the far wall up there, and then hit the floor with a resounding thud.

Her door smashed open, hitting the wall with a hurried crash and Rufe stood there with a wild look in his eyes.

“No! No, Hope, no!”

“What?” she asked. “I’m tired Rufe, not now, okay?”

“That’s Michael Flatus up there,” he hissed, tip-toeing up to her bedside and gently prying the gleaming blue weapon from her reluctant hand, although it was empty now anyway.

“Who? What?” she gasped.

“Yes!” he assured her. “Michael Flatus, the Broadway star, and a headliner in Danse of the Mucky Old Creeks.”

“That one was off Broadway, so far off Broadway you could say it was in the Bowery,” she noted doubtfully.

“I don’t care if it was Staten Island! He’s frickin’ famous,” Rufe stuttered.

It was quiet up there now. Blood dripped out of some holes over by the corner of the room.

Jaw hanging, eyeballs bulging, Rufe turned and stared at the ever-widening pool of blood in the corner.

“Now, if you don’t mind, sir, I would like to get some sleep,” said Hope, and with firm resolve, she turned over on her side, pulled the blankets up under her chin and closed her eyes.

“But…but…” he stammered.

“They’ll never hang a good-looking woman, Rufe,” she said without opening her eyes.

He thought about it for a moment. This was the woman he loved, and would, forever-more.

There was the sound of cautious footsteps, and then her door closed. She popped her eyes open, craned her neck, and made sure Rufe had really left the room. She leaned over, and checked under the bed. Then a very tired Hope Ng put her head down for good that night. She was snoring in ladylike fashion all of three minutes later, with visions of dumping magazine after magazine of 7.63 ball ammunition into carnival shooting galleries chock-full of sugar-plum fairies dancing in her head. She’d never actually fired the thing before. It was a really nice gun, when you got right down to it, even in that daze-like state between wakefulness and downright dreaming.

'On the Nature of the Gods' is available on iTunes in the iBookstore.