The Viking and the Courtesan - Time Travel with Shehanne Moore

Shehanne Moore is one of my favourite people - and one of my favourite authors. When I decide to take a break from horror, my preferred default genre is historical. I love losing myself in other worlds, other times. Shehanne has the ability to bring a fresh, new perspective to historical romance which, mercifully, takes the reader on a rollercoaster ride, far removed from heaving bosoms and fainting heroines. She has a fantastic new release - The Viking and the Courtesan - coming out on July 29th and is my guest today. At the heart of her new story is a timeslip and here she talks about a most curious incident involving a tragic Queen and a couple of Edwardian lady academics...

 

  "You’re face to face with the woman who ruined France.”

Time travel? It is possible? A large number of authors certainly think so. Look at all the films, books and TV series that have been made and written about just that subject. And even though it’s now 2015 and we don’t have hover boards like this...

... we still love the thought we might.

Surely this guy here is a time traveller….right?
 

The clothes, the sun glasses…everything is wrong for the vintage.

And this woman has no clue how she got there.

You could ask an aunt of mine, only she’s dead now, who was convinced she once met two women from the future. Well, she thought they were space travellers but their clothes would not be out of place today.

Anyway, the lovely and talented Catherine Cavendish, whose books I adore so much I am tapping my fingers waiting for her new one, Dark Avenging Angel:

(Blushes) Thank you, Shey!

and who has been kind enough to invite me here today, is famed not just for her wonderful, horror stories but her spooky blog. So, firstly, after thanking her, what I am going to talk about today, is the creepy Moberly-Jourdain incident and how two extremely well educated ladies came to be regarded as nutcases. 

Eleanor Jourdain

Prior to taking up her appointment as Vice Principal St. Hughes College, of Charlotte Anne Moberly had gone to stay with Eleanor Jourdain in Paris. The possibility of going to the Palace of Versailles was discussed and they did indeed travel there with a Baedeker guidebook. As with all guidebooks—certainly ones I’ve come across—they found the description differed from what was clearly written on the page. What was that old deserted farmhouse doing smack bang in the middle of the road? In fact where was the road? As for the turning for the main avenue? How could the guidebook have it so wrong? 

They would be writing a strongly worded letter of complaint to Baedeker’s publishers when they got home.

Still, although everything began to look ‘wrong’ they hurried on, not wanting to ask directions of the ‘repulsive man in the shady hat’, skulking on a bench. Imagine their relief when they finally crossed a bridge and reached the gardens in front of the palace and saw a lady just like themselves. Only she wasn’t like themselves. She was like Marie Antoinette….with her head still attached of course. (Sorry Cat, your blog does this to me.) (Quite understandable, Shey - Cat)

Anyway, the women found their way out of Versailles and back to Paris. After a while they began to question whether Versailles was haunted. The actual date they were there was the same date in 1792 when the Tuileries palace in Paris was besieged, the king's Swiss guards were massacred, and the monarchy itself was abolished six weeks later. Convinced that it was haunted they decided to go back but of farmhouse, bench and bridge, there was no sign. So, then, after trying to determine whether a private party had been taking place that day—apparently, the French poet Montesquiou did give parties there--where his guests dressed up in period costume, their next move was to publish a book. It was called An Adventure and caused something of a sensation. Marie Antoinette was alive and well and living in 1901 apparently.

Moberly, not content with the spectacle she was making of herself, went on to meet the Roman emperor Constantine, a man of unusual height wearing a gold crown and a toga, in the Louvre (as you do), while Jourdain caused a sensation during the First World War when she insisted a German spy was hiding in St Hugh’s College.

It’s very easy to dismiss these women and their fanciful claims. Let’s be clear, there is not a single documented piece of evidence to support the fact that time travel is possible and has ever happened. We writers know that a time travel story requires the suspension of disbelief.

Here’s the rub though, before we get too sceptical on the subject of time travel and these two ladies in particular. They went to Versailles in 1901. In 1903 an old map of the Trianon Gardens at Versailles was discovered. Remember that bridge, the one they couldn’t find when they went back there because it didn’t exist? It was on the map. 

Now read on, for an extract from The Viking and the Courtesan:

Malice shook her head fervently. “I have a husband.” It was true, wasn’t it? Even if that husband was Cyril and he wasn’t up to much.

“Then where is he?”

“Well—”

A good question. One she hadn’t considered. She was the first to admit Cyril and the Vikings wouldn’t be a good idea. He’d be sure to offer them a drink and her knowledge of them was it was the worst thing to offer a Viking--short of offering them a woman anyway. But just suppose he was about? Was she meant to believe she was the only one blighted by the intensity of that kiss? That he wasn’t about somewhere? Again, her mother crept into her head. It had been very strange behaviour for someone on their death bed. And now, she came to think of it, there hadn’t actually been a funeral, more a sort of memory planted by Aunt Carter eventually. Suppose--oh God—it was a family thing?

“See! She don’t have no husband because she’s one of them. Liar! Liar!”

Malice’s throat constricted. Once again she was the object of ridicule, the unloved child, the freak other children called names, pointed at because she was that tiny bit different and the world she inhabited was one they didn’t understand.

She would rather face the Vikings than this. Only that wasn’t an option. As for Cyril, he wasn’t an option either, whether he was here, or not. Nor could he very well raise any alarm about her disappearance when he didn’t even know it was her in that bedroom. There was only one thing she could do with her back against the wall like this even if she’d sooner swallow a crocodile, its Aunt Sally, its aged grandmother and the aged grandmother’s Uncle Herbert. It would be a hideous disfigurement.

What other choice did she have? If she didn’t they would kill her.

Very well.” She extended her hand. “Give me that knife.” 

Coming from Soul Mate Publishing 29th July 2015

In 898 AD she wasn’t just from another land.

Wrecking a marriage is generally no problem for the divorce obtaining, Lady Malice Mallender. But she faces a dilemma when she’s asked to ruin her own. Just how businesslike should she remain when the marriage was never consummated and kissing her husband leads to Sin--a handsome Viking who wants her for a bed slave in name only?

She came from another time.

Viking raider Sin Gudrunsson wants one thing. To marry his childhood sweetheart. Only she’s left him before, so he needs to keep her on her toes, and a bed slave, in name only, seems just the thing. Until he meets Malice.

One kiss is all it takes to flash between two worlds

But when one kiss is no longer enough, which will it be? Regency London? Or Viking Norway? Will Malice learn what governs the flashes? Can Sin?

Where worlds collide can love melt the iciest heart?  

You can pre-order The Viking and the Courtesan here:

Amazon.com 

Amazon.co.uk 

 

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A Case of Prophetic Fiction...

... or How My Words Will Bring About the End of the World

by

  

 Ronald Malfi

 

My wife is terrified. She’s got a theory and it may be right. I’ve been ignoring it for some time, but now...well, now it’s getting harder and harder to look the other way. And the children...they’re watching us.

            Let me back up...

            Even before I’d met my wife, it had been going on. My high school friends—those who read my stories, my manuscripts—commented on the peculiarity of them, the serendipitous and eerily prophetic nature of some of my stories. At around thirteen years old, I wrote a story about a thunderstorm that brought dead things back to life. I printed it out and handed it off to one of my best friends who took it home that night and read it...until the power went out in his house due to a raging thunderstorm. The next morning, a dead squirrel had been washed up on his front porch. It wasn’t the zombified version that appeared in my story, but it was close enough to cause him some consternation.

            Sometime later, I wrote a story about a group of friends who fight a monster, and at the end of the story, one of the characters, who was based on one of my best friends, moves to California. About a year later, that friend’s family indeed picked up and moved. To California. The remaining friends, who thought I had conspired with my typewriter to make this happen, blamed me for a while. 

            Soon afterward, I wrote what, at the time (I was still a high-schooler), I considered my epic story. At 500 pages, I had written a manuscript called The House in the Woods, and had used all my friends as characters in it. (Many, many years later, a very different version of this original manuscript would be published as what I currently consider my epic novel, December Park.) There is a scene in the original manuscript where the boys tromp through the woods surrounding their town and come across the burnt-out hull of a 1957 Chevy. A very random scene. The woods were a real place in the town where I grew up, and we frequently ventured into them, but of course we never found the cannibalized corpse of an old car...until after I’d written that scene. But then there it was, written into existence, an old Chevy in the woods, just as I had written it. (It was too decayed to tell if it was exactly a 1957, but it was close enough for government work.)

            Things only got worse from there.

            Once I got married, settled into real life, and began publishing on a regular basis, the prophetic nature of my fiction only seemed to increase. I wrote a novel called Passenger, which included a fairly gratuitous dog-fight scene, something I knew existed but was rarely if ever talked about on the news. Soon after, Michael Vick was on all the TV channels. After that, I wrote a novel called Snow, and although here in Maryland our winters are generally mild, we were unapologetically crushed by a terrible snowstorm later that year.

            “Cut it out,” my wife told me. “I know you’re doing it. And I hate the cold.”

            She knew of my friends’ claims that what I wrote about back in high school came true, and I thought maybe she was starting to believe it. As for me, I just attributed it to coincidence, like how, back in the 1980s, all those switching-bodies movies came out at the same time. Coincidence, right?

            My wife was pregnant with our first child while I was writing Cradle Lake, which focuses on a couple who have suffered a series of miscarriages. Our daughter was born without a problem, but it wasn’t until the book was published and my wife got pregnant a second time that the doctors alerted us to all the possible “problems” we might face this second time around. Of course, my wife and I were upset. “It’s your book,” said my wife. “It’s happening again. Please stop.”

            Thankfully, the pregnancy scare turned out okay and our second daughter was born happy and healthy, which is much better than how the Hammerstuns of Cradle Lake turned out, but it was still too close for comfort.

            Which brings us up to date. Perhaps it’s hypersensitivity on my wife’s part or perhaps I’ve surrendered to the superstition and finally bought into it, but with the looming publication date of Little Girls, my wife and I have found that our own little girls have been acting...well, strangely. They have begun waking up in the middle of the night and walking about the house, as if in search of something. Twice, I’ve opened my eyes to find my four-year-old daughter staring down at me in bed. She seems to intuit when the mailman will come, and stands by the door mere minutes before the arrival of the little white truck. And my one-year-old daughter has been mumbling a phrase that sounds disconcertingly like, “kill Daddy.”

            “It’s happening again,” says my wife. “Your book...”

            I try not to think about it too much, even when my daughter starts humming a song in the car, and when I turn on the radio, that song is playing. Or how she seems to know of distant relatives whom she’s never met that have died, and how she claims my wife and I will be seeing them soon...

            These anecdotes are frightening enough, but I feel I must apologize to the public at large. Not for Little Girls, which I think is a perfectly fine book, and not for my little girls who, most of the time, are also perfectly fine, but for next year’s release—a book titled The Night Parade. Which, dear readers, I’m sorry to report, is about the end of the world.

            Nice knowing you.

From Bram Stoker Award nominee Ronald Malfi comes a brilliantly chilling novel of childhood revisited, memories resurrected, and fears reborn…

When Laurie was a little girl, she was forbidden to enter the room at the top of the stairs. It was one of many rules imposed by her cold, distant father. Now, in a final act of desperation, her father has exorcised his demons. But when Laurie returns to claim the estate with her husband and ten-year-old daughter, it’s as if the past refuses to die. She feels it lurking in the broken moldings, sees it staring from an empty picture frame, and hears it laughing in the moldy greenhouse deep in the woods…
 
At first, Laurie thinks she’s imagining things. But when she meets her daughter’s new playmate, Abigail, she can’t help but notice her uncanny resemblance to another little girl who used to live next door. Who died next door. With each passing day, Laurie’s uneasiness grows stronger, her thoughts more disturbing. Like her father, is she slowly losing her mind? Or is something truly unspeakable happening to those sweet little girls?

Praise for Ronald Malfi and his novels:

“One cannot help but think of writers like Peter Straub and Stephen King.”
—FearNet

"Malfi is a skillful storyteller."—New York Journal of Books

"A complex and chilling tale….terrifying."—Robert McCammon

"Malfi’s lyrical prose creates an atmosphere of eerie claustrophobia…haunting."—Publishers Weekly

"A thrilling, edge-of-your-seat ride that should not be missed."—Suspense Magazine

Links to Pre-Order or Purchase:

Amazon
Barnes and Noble
Kobo

Or pick up or ask to order at your local independent bookstore or anywhere e-formats are sold!

Ronald Malfi

Ronald Malfi is an award-winning author of many novels and novellas in the horror, mystery, and thriller categories from various publishers, including Little Girls, this summer’s 2015 release from Kensington.

In 2009, his crime drama, Shamrock Alley, won a Silver IPPY Award. In 2011, his ghost story/mystery novel, Floating Staircase, was a finalist for the Horror Writers Association Bram Stoker Award for best novel, a Gold IPPY Award for best horror novel, and the Vincent Preis International Horror Award. His novel Cradle Lake garnered him the Benjamin Franklin Independent Book Award (silver) in 2014. December Park, his epic childhood story, won the Beverly Hills International Book Award for suspense in 2015.

Most recognized for his haunting, literary style and memorable characters, Malfi's dark fiction has gained acceptance among readers of all genres.

He was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1977, and eventually relocated to the Chesapeake Bay area, where he currently resides with his wife and two children.

Visit with Ronald Malfi on:

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Website

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