Do you have dark side? A secret side?
Calling all you secret spice lovers. Come on in. We have tea and cookies (and wine)
So.
and I have written a series: we united our vampire worlds. No small undertaking. It’s rather…explosive? It’s very sexual. It’s very queer. This book, and the vampires it chronicles, gives zero fucks. Are you in? Because we’re looking for ARC readers now.For months, we wracked our brains over whether to release this work. It was only an experiment, you see… a bit of a playground for both of us. A sandbox, in which two writers could unleash. No marketing. No rules. No censorship. No pandering to what publishers’ genre golden child was of the moment. Besides: no publisher would touch this book with a ten-foot pole.
It was like riding a horse with no saddle. Exhilarating.
We aren’t plotters. If you’ve heard us talk, you know this by now. We let the characters talk, and we listen: and we write it down. We’re basically just scribes.
AHEM.
So what emerged was an extremely spicy tale. And it is super queer. MON DIEU.
*cue pearl-clutching*
What are we to do with this? What will people think of us?
Spoiler alert: we wrote a beautiful, heart-wrenching story (our favourite kind), in the language that people know us for, but we took the bridle off.
We’ve tossed (🤭) this over and over again in discussions … why is gore okay, why is splatter okay, why is psychological terror okay … but the worship of another’s body is NOT okay? Sex is not okay?
Our mantra: there is no shame in expressing sexuality.
So we leaned in.
What has become of our society where extreme violence is acceptable — whether it’s on page or in glorious technicolour on a screen — but we recoil from human connection? From touch, from love, from appreciating the drag of a finger across one’s skin? And through a queer lens?
Dare we consider that there are others who need love even if they’re off the binary?
Is that true horror? Connection, peeling one’s mask off and saying, ‘look at me, touch me, I am vulnerable to you, this is me?’
These are topics we explore in A Conclave of Crimson. It’s a series, and Book One is on sale 7 March 2024. But, we’d love to have early readers. Conclave is not for the weak: it’s raw, shamelessly erotic, and rupturing with longing and angst.
We know there are readers out there for this book. We have a hard time finding comps. But we’re looking for readers who actually enjoy having their hearts ripped out of their chests, who champion queer voices and queer love, and who love mixing sex and horror in a literary way. With no fade to black.
Beautiful horror.
Beautiful sex.
Horrorromance.
Are you in?
Join our Early Readers Guild (ARC Team) here. Content inclusions and triggers explicitly stated on the form.
I have to say, while I'm obviously a huge fan of horror in all its guises, it has always troubled me that in film, for example, someone being beheaded gets a lower age restriction than nudity, by default. I really don't know what this says about our societal norms, but I don't think it's anything good.
I'm not advocating for heavier restriction of violence, by the way. But I do think the general public hand wringing over sex, and different sexualities, in particular, needs to be binned.
Best of luck to both of you with this one! ❤️🔥