Higher Love
Author
Jennifer Word
Author Bio
Jennifer Word is an award winning poet, novelist and editor. She resides in Ventura County, CA with her two children, two cats, and a plecostomus. She holds a B.A. in Psychology from Pepperdine University. She loves horror, both written and cinema. She has written multiple novels and dozens of short stories, half a dozen novellas, and award winning poetry. She works as an Associate Editor for the horror magazine Dark Moon Digest. As of February, 2015, she is proud to join the staff of Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing as a Copy Editor. Her short stories and poetry have been printed in The Storyteller, The Klondike Sun, Dark Moon Digest e-Magazine (Dark Eclipse), Surreal Grotesque, eFiction, and multiple anthologies, including Slices of Flesh, Zombies Need Love, Too, & Frightmares c/o Dark Moon Books, and From Beyond the Grave c/o Grinning Skull Press. Most recently, she has launched her own independent professional editing service, ‘Contract Editing Services’, through Thumbtack.
Description
This is an Urban Fantasy/Modern-Day Fairytale. It is a dark story of love, mystery, deceipt and graphic allure. *Warning, this story is rated R, due to strong sexual content, and sexual violence.
-When artist Jack Court meets the woman of his dreams, he realizes there may be more to this new love than meets the eye. What is the link between this mysterious beauty and his paintings?
Jack is haunted by childhood memories that he renders to canvas, and one day, Terra enters his life wanting to buy a painting that depicts the most violent and disturbing day of his life. Who is Terra? And why does she want the story behind Jack’s painting? As Jack learns the answers to these questions, he gets much more than he bargained for.
I wrote this story from an idea I became fascinated with; an image of a modern, Gothic looking city of gray stone and concrete buildings, but directly underneath this city, there’s a hidden underground society that never comes into the world above, save for “Recruiters” who come to steal people from above to increase the numbers of this dark and sinister underground city. I wanted it to be a story of star-crossed lovers from two different worlds. I also wanted the story to play upon the imagery of dark and light, good versus evil, and the blurred lines and shades of gray as these concepts tend to overlap.
The strong sexual content and sexual violence develop in Act III of my story. I was as surprised as anyone, even while writing it, that the story seemed to take me in that direction, but I decided to hold true to that avenue of the story, and allow it to tell itself the way it seemed to want to. All my stories tend to end up leading me and taking on a life of their own. The dark aspects of the story, which underline the entire course of the book would finally become so stark and acute in the third and final act, and even the stronger sexual content and violence in the third section seemed more appropriate than earlier physical couplings within the story that are a bit G-rated, or PG at best.
I do worry my story will be misinterpreted or miss-judged, and subsequently overlooked, due to the more sexually explicit sections, which I had to be forthcoming about, so readers could expect it, but that does sway some readers to pass over my book, and even the cover has been a bit of a problem, besides the sexual content warning. For example, the cover could be interpreted as cheap or unprofessional looking, but I paid a designer to make it. I wanted a cover that looked like a fantasy fairytale; a sort of unreal, other-wordly look to it. I also specifically wanted it to look like a painting the main character, artist Jack Court, had painted, and I wanted it to depict a very specific painting, including a tree, that Jack paints. So you see, quite a bit of thought actually went into the cover design, but I’m not certain it actually lends itself to the purchase appeal I’d wish for it to inspire in prospective readers, which is a shame.
In the end, I simply wanted to deliver a sort of modern fairytale/Urban Legend of sorts that was also a love story, and part mystery, part fantasy, and hopefully I did that well enough for readers to enjoy this story, both the PG parts and the more ‘R’ rated passages, as well as the dream-like art of the cover.
Book excerpt
I: Formidia
1. There was once a gothic city by the sea. They called it Formidia. Towering and vast, its gray concrete buildings nestled into the mountainous cliffs overlooking the dark, gray water. It spread up across the ragged cliffs, and down into the inland valleys, and came to rest dramatically, plunged to the very edge of the water.
Downtown offered the sound of crashing waves, the shuffling of pedestrian’s feet, and open markets selling trinkets along boardwalks hidden among the maze of tall buildings. One street over from the waters’ edge, the only hint of an ocean was the salty smell that drifted into the nostrils of shoppers and vendors on a light breeze. All one had to do to glimpse the steel-colored waters only hinted at, was turn down Gall Street and head south. This one street headed straight, without turns, from the highest cliff, down to the very edge of rock, which directly kissed the sea. It was always bright at the end of Gall Street, even on a cloudy day. This was the heart of the boardwalk market.
The Gall Street Boardwalk Market is where Jack Court sold every one of his paintings. It was his second favorite place in all of Formidia. His first was the Alcyon Cemetery, where he set many of his paintings. The market, however, was where he met Terra.
He saw her as she approached, and he immediately thought of angels. She was wearing all white, her skin was a milky shade of opaque porcelain, her hair the color of the sun. The breeze gently pushed her locks off her shoulders as she approached Jack’s work. He hung back, watching; Admiring.
She stood in front of a painting. She looked. Then she moved on to another, and another. Then she stood, once again, in front of a group of paintings set in Alcyon. One in particular seemed to take her attention; a landscape scene in the cemetery, on a barren hill with a lone tree. Jack dared to approach then, cautiously. He wondered who she was.
She stood rigid, frowning. He frowned back from over the edge of the canvas. She didn’t see him there. She seemed transfixed. He watched her brilliant green eyes as they gazed at his painting. He watched something akin to confusion dance inside her gaze. He wondered what she was thinking about.
Suddenly, those bright green orbs darted up, and came to rest staring directly into Jack’s brown eyes. His heart jumped; only for a moment. Then he cleared his throat and smiled. He went up on tip-toe to look fully at her, then shook his head, his curly dark locks flopping. Still smiling, he came around from behind the painting to stand next to her; this confused beauty.
“You don’t like it?” he asked. He motioned to the painting.
“I do,” she said, “but is it real?”
“Real?” Now it was Jack’s turn to frown.
“Is this the Cemetery,” she asked.
“Yes. It’s Alcyon.”
Author Website
http://www.amazon.com/Jennifer-Word/e/B005MW5920/ref=ntt_dp_epwbk_0
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Higher Love
