Indomitable Ink are releasing the full Starblood series over the next four weeks. Friday, 28th May is release day for book one, so I thought I’d tell you a little about the first book, the graphic novel based on the story, and some of the characters you will meet.
Starblood can be found at http://smarturl.it/Starblood.
Satori, an arrogant yet alluring Chaos Magician, is heart-broken when Star tells him it is over. He performs a magical ritual to win her back, but accidentally brings Lilith, Mother of Demons, to Earth. How can Satori survive the demon’s wrath and reclaim the heart of his beloved?
Beautiful and vulnerable, Star has yet to discover her own power and strength. When she falls in love with the enchanting Lilith, her world descends into madness and violence. Satori’s strange world threatened her sanity, what then of Lilith’s?
A sensuous story, full of dark fantasy and horror, that offers readers a glimpse into the seedier side of the Gothic subculture in Britain.
Written in British English. Starblood is volume one of the four-part Starblood series, but can be read alone.
Caution: contains graphic violence, strong language, and explicit erotic scenes (including LGBTQ content), and is not recommended for young readers.
“In a market flooded with badly written supernatural romances passed off as horror, Carmilla Voiez is a prophet of the uncanny. Not since Clive Barker has any author mastered pure, visceral atrocity, and yet her characters maintain an elegance and humanity that turns what could just be a blood sport into a Shakespearean tragedy. Starblood may be the only true female horror novel in existence, and within its pages a reader is forced at knifepoint to see the world through the eyes of the raped, the abused, and the unloved with hateful clarity. She makes us bear witness to the demons we ourselves create. You don’t read her books. You survive them.”
Jef Rouner (Houston Press).
The two main characters in Starblood are Star and Satori. Both are Goths and live in the city of Bristol in England.
Star has recently left art college when the story starts. She’s working in a call centre and has recently broken up with Satori. She thinks she’s straight before she meets the story’s antagonist, Lilith. She is plagued by visions, haunted by an abusive childhood, and is convinced she is either evil or losing her mind.
Satori is a Chaos Magician who attempts a ritual summoning of the demon Furfur to win back Star’s love. He is bisexual, androgynous, and still living at home with his mother, even though he’s the oldest of the friends.
Lilith, mother of demons, is the antagonist with whom Star falls in love.
(Character artwork by Anna Prashkovich.)
The graphic novel can be found at http://smarturl.it/sgnebook.
The Starblood series adapts the conventions of horror and dark fantasy in order to explore the depths of both human and inhuman psyches. The message is one of self acceptance. So what if we don’t fit in? We are still important. We have value. Our dreams mean something, and as Lilith says in the first book, “There is no shame in love, only completion.” I hope people can see that Lilith is not only talking about romantic love, but also love and acceptance of self and the multi-faceted, unique and marvellous people we have in our lives.
5* review - “The story itself goes beyond horror. There are some truly gruesome parts (chapter 2 is glorious). It’s definitely supernatural, but also very human. I massively enjoyed this book on so many levels it's hard to express it in a review without giving too much away. So you should read it for yourself.” (Starblood – Amazon UK).
Carmilla Voiez is a proudly bisexual and mildly autistic introvert who finds writing much easier than verbal communication. A life long Goth, she is passionate about horror, the alt scene, intersectional feminism, art, nature and animals. When not writing, she gets paid to hang out in a stately home and entertain tourists. She lives and works by the sea in North Scotland and is studying an Arts and Humanities (Creating Writing) BA(Hons) degree. Carmilla grew up on a varied diet of horror. Her earliest influences as a teenage reader were Graham Masterton, Brian Lumley and Clive Barker mixed with the romance of Hammer Horror and the visceral violence of the first wave of Video Nasties. Fascinated by the Goth aesthetic and enchanted by threnodies of eighties Goth and post-punk music she evolved into the creature of darkness we find today. Her books are both extraordinarily personal and universally challenging. As Jef Withonef of Houston Press once said - "You do not read her books, you survive them."
Comments