YELEN & YELENA RELEASE
My Gothic Dark Fantasy based on Beauty and the Beast (but with an aromantic and bisexual twist, plus a lot of body horror and family tragedy), is almost here!
It has erotic scenes, but it is not a Romance, although there are sapphic and achillean elements alongside the sexual m/f monster/human relationship – think along the lines of Heather Rose Jones’s The Language of Roses, with elements of T. Kingfisher’s Gothic sporror fantasy What Moves The Dead, and Naomi Novik’s Uprooted.
ARCs for YELEN & YELENA have now all gone out – take as long as you need to read and review.
Ko-Fi Members Go Here: https://ko-fi.com/s/28411cf7f2
Review copies are also available in eBook format.
Release is 14th Feb, if you can get reviews in by then, that would be amazing, but don’t worry if not!
Happy for them to trickle in when you’re ready!
ONCE UPON A TIME… In a rural corner of the Provinces simmering with civil unrest, Laundress Yelena’s village is plagued by a dangerous fungal rot oozing from the forest. When she is falsely accused of dark sorcery and evicted from her cottage so her landlord can sell up, Yelena is forced to leave her home and loved ones behind, and entrusts herself to the wind-borne voices of the restless dead to see where they lead her.
Yelen is a forgotten tyrant, turned into a monster hundreds of years ago after accepting a cursed flower, and left to stalk his enchanted castle all alone. Despite becoming a better person over the centuries, Yelen’s aromanticism means he can never fulfil the ‘mutual romantic love’ condition of the curse, and to his relief, he will never have to return to form of the power-hungry brute he once was… But he craves companionship and an end to his lonely existence.
When the wind leads Yelena to Yelen, she discovers a kindred spirit in the aromantic, bi-attracted monster, and their relationship quickly escalates. But being a guest in a cursed castle with a lonely, amorous Beast is not all fun and games – while exploring, Yelena makes a disturbing discovery about the source of the rot, and starts showing symptoms of infection herself.
Can Yelen and Yelena work together to find a lasting cure for the rot seeping beyond the castle walls, or will the curse claim another victim?
Content Notes
This is not a romance – the characters are explicitly aromantic (they do not experience romantic attraction, in their cases, not ever) and bi-attracted allosexual (they do experience sexual attraction, and are both bisexual). There are both fade-to-blur and moderately graphic on-page sapphic sex scenes and M/F monster sex scenes. The world is queer-normative and includes non-binary identities.
This book deals with themes of death (loss, grief, murder, suicide, self-sacrifice, and the afterlife), community (its construction, reconstruction, and destruction), family (loss of family, found family, chosen family), possession, loss of agency and autonomy, and mental health issues. There is also civil unrest, lynching of landlords, and the appearance of soldiers and militia.
Content Warnings
Family deaths; frequent suicide ideation; on-page violent suicide and murder; implied SA mention; depression; depersonalisation and derealisation; social ostracism; eviction; some body horror related to the rot (fungal infections, fruiting bodies, etc).
Civil unrest – revolution and civil war, lynching of landlords, soldiers clearing villages and hunting peasants.
Animal death: wolf hunting mentioned, and rabbit hunting and butchery for food on page.
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