Red Queen Rising--Dark Fantasy by Melissa McCann

Red Queen cover mockup

Red Queen Rising (title very much a work in progress)

I have since early adolescence been a fan of HP Lovecraft's eldritch stories of extra-dimensional creatures seeping down from the stars and behaving reprehensibly once ensconced on Earth. I loved his dark places and effete scholars and depraved young men studying strange, non-euclidean geometries and great reaches of time far beyond human imagination. There was something captivating and beautiful about it. Actually, those effete scholars and depraved young men thought the same thing, and it never ended well...

So, I was watching a movie adaptation of one of my favorite Lovecraft stories one day, huffing and snorting and grumbling through the miserable production and occasionally heaping abuse on the bumbling director and screenwriters and finally blurting, "That's NOT how you do a Lovecraft story; THIS is how you do a Lovecraft story." And I pulled up my favorite outlining software and grumbled and snorted and huffed my way through an outline employing all the essential tropes required in the creation of a proper HP Lovecraft(ish) story. And when the outline was all done, the story looked like so much fun, I had to write it. And I did. And it was (is). And I think there's a sequel. I want to call it "A Very Cthulhu Christmas," but realistically, that's just not going to work because the story isn't quite silly enough.

Quick synopsis of Red Queen Doing Something Eldritch and Possibly Tenebrous Just Because Tenebrous is Such a Nice Word:
When Hal Crompton comes home from Iraq scarred and crippled by the IED that decimated his squad, he finds his childhood friend Alistair Blackwood deep in the study of ancient creatures that lived in the Earth ages before the evolution of humankind. Alistair has grown increasingly twisted and bitter since Hal joined the army, and now means to find a way to travel between universes and bring back a sleeping demon goddess from her prison in the valley of shadows where all the old creatures have been imprisoned out of time.
Will Hal be able to stop his friend from achieving his demented triumph, and what will be the cost to Hal if he succeeds?--

Favorite line: When Hal's friend Mora--an occult mathematician (no, I don't know what that is, either, but then I only got as far as geometry--the regular Euclidean kind)--finally figures out why people read fiction, she...looked as pleased as if she had just discovered the mathematical  formula for peanut-butter.

Anyway, the first draft is completed, but I have paused to go back and first revise Skin--which is now called "Symbiont"--and its sequel.