THE DUKE IN HIS CASTLE by Nebula Award-nominated author and award-winning artist Vera Nazarian is a dark, lush, erotic fantasy novella in the vein of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast, with interior illustrations by the author. Rossian, the young Duke of Violet, wastes away in mad solitude, unable to leave the confines of his decadent castle grounds because of a mysterious invisible barrier...until a strange female intruder arrives at the castle bearing a box of bones. "Vera Nazarian combines the wry and poignant charm of Hans Christian Andersen with the subversive wallop of Angela Carter in crafting this gem of a fairy tale. No longer merely a promising writer, Nazarian has arrived." -Paul Witcover "Vera Nazarian is a writer seemingly so full of story that it just comes bubbling uncontrollably out of her... The Duke in his Castle shows her at the peak of her form in a deceptively simple tale that probes the nature of life and death, of power and succumbing, and ultimately of good and both the evils-active evil and the evil born from apathy." -John Grant, Co-Editor of The Encyclopedia of Fantasy
Author
Vera Nazarian is a two-time Nebula Award Finalist, award-winning artist, and member of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, a writer with a penchant for moral fables and stories of intense wonder, true love, and intricacy. She immigrated to the USA from the former USSR as a kid, sold her first story at the age of 17, and since then has published numerous works in anthologies and magazines, and has seen her fiction translated into eight languages. She is the author of critically acclaimed novels Dreams of the Compass Rose and Lords of Rainbow , romantic Renaissance epic fantasy trilogy Cobweb Bride , as well as the outrageous parodies Mansfield Park and Mummies and Northanger Abbey and Angels and Dragons , Pride and Platypus: Mr. Darcy's Dreadful Secret in her humorous and surprisingly romantic Supernatural Jane Austen Series , and most recently the bestselling high-octane science fiction series The Atlantis Grail , now optioned for film. After many years in Los Angeles, Vera lives in a small town in Vermont, and uses her Armenian sense of humor and her Russian sense of suffering to bake conflicted pirozhki and make art. Take the fun quiz to find out Which of the Lords of Rainbow do You Serve?
