Broken World Book 4
Urban Fantasy/Paranormal
Date Published: January 3, 2020
Publisher: Transmundane Press
Drawing the Scarlet Queen to central New York’s training grounds, Ria’s remarkable blood triggers negotiations between two kingdoms.
Ria questions her own humanity when she finds herself aligned with Phea, the vampire queen—a woman who’s tortured her and her friends for months.
As all of her secrets unravel around her, Ria is forced to conform or sacrifice the people she loves.
If she doesn’t find a way to break their alliance, the balance of the universe will plunge deeper into chaos, and no one will be safe.
With a sprinkling of Twilight, a bite of Anita Blake, and a smattering of satirical Buffy the Vampire Slayer, you won't want to miss this dark and witty vampire series.
Interview with Alisha Costanzo
What was the hardest scene from your book to
write?
The big fight before
the death before the final fight was the hardest. Real specific, I know, but
two important characters from the good side and the bad side die. All three
scenes were hard to write, but making it all seem earned and not too easy was
the real struggle.
Why did you choose to write in your particular
field or genre?
I grew up reading it,
starting with R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps
and Fear Street and everything by
Christopher Pike, but especially his The
Last Vampire series. I love the violence, sex, mythology, and satirical
skews that I can play with in a paranormal/urban fantasy/horror landscape.
Creatures are the best way to comment on society without targeting anyone in
particular, but I can certainly say a lot about conformity and dictatorships,
which casts a wide net.
If you write in more than one genre, how do you
balance them?
I sort of do this,
although all are considered paranormal/urban fantasy, I do write YA, NA, and
Adult books (aka erotic), and they require different focuses—like a pen name. I
find balance with the characters. Focusing on their motives keeps their worlds
separate. Plus, I use a lot of planners
and templates and paperwork to keep me on track.
What did you enjoy most about writing this book?
Ria finding her dead
mother’s diary and meeting the boy vampire her father saved before his death were
real perks, and they happened in the same chapter. But this book allowed me to
connect most of my other works in the series with Ria’s main story arc. Ramping
up for the finale had me pack a lot of links in this book, and I loved every
bit of it.
What book that you have read has most influenced
your life?
A Season of Passage by Christopher Pike.
He was not only my author hero as a teen, but that book, the vampire series,
and Sati had the biggest influences
on me creatively because it acknowledged that others thought like I did and
liked the same strange stories I had a knack for making up.
Tell us a little about yourself? Perhaps
something not many people know?
It is really hard to
embarrass me. After growing up with an affectionate mother, who liked to yodel
my nickname—Squeaker Butt—down the grocery aisle of my workplace, with an
unavoidable awkwardness that seeps into pretty much everything I do, and with a
group of bullies that followed me to high school, my give-a-shit button has
kind of broken. I don’t think anyone can embarrass me as much as I have, but
that’s what self-deprecating humor is for.
For example, last
semester, I told one of my students that I loved him instead of that I’d love
for him to elaborate on something in his paper. He was my last conference of
the day, and luckily, because I made fun of myself for it, he laughed it off,
too.
Can you tell us something about your book that
is not in the summary?
I would love to, which
means I’m going to ramble. Hold onto your seats because here’s a ton of
background on the forces at play in my Broken World.
Ria, the protagonist,
is a half-phoenix, half-human hybrid that was changed into a vampire and
imprinted with a seven-foot-tall leprechaun. She’s stuck between three kingdoms
that want to use her unique blood to shift control of the paranormal world in
their favor.
First, the
Celampresians are named after the queen of the vampires, the first one in
existence: Phea Celampresian. She’s vain, so she named her army after herself. Essentially,
the Celampresians are the bad guys, an evil coalition that aims to kill off
most of the shifter races because Phea wants a dictatorship with all paranormal
creatures under her control. This stems from her birth as the first paranormal
creature, the mother of all vampires and the grandmother of all shifters.
Second,
the Assetato are supposed to be the good guys, but their means of fighting
don’t always seem so pure. They combat Phea’s control over them and want to
live more peacefully, although they also battle their natural impulses to
consume human blood and flesh. They are mostly good-doers in the U.S. but are
more aggressive in Europe, as I will explore in an upcoming spin-off novel
about a mermaid-unicorn. This is why they create safe houses: to house their
brethren away from the Celampresians, to protect humans, to let their soldiers
heal, and to safeguard humans against their base natures.
The
last note I want to make about the Assetato as an organization and all of the
links between the two groups is this—Anthemos Romulus Celampresian. Anthemos,
or Mumu as his mother likes to call him, is the Atlantean god of beasts, the
only god remaining from that pantheon, and the father of shifters.To put it
bluntly, he’s both Phea’s son and the real driving force behind the
organization that combats her. Besides all of the Atlantean threads at play in
Ria’s tale, Anthemos’s function is more deeply tied than I let on. He is, after
all, his mother’s son, and their relationship affects a lot more than a few
camps of creatures.
Last, Marusya
Negreev, the Scarlet Queen, single-handedly seized the faerie mound in the Soviet
Union just before the Russian Revolution and the fall of Tsar Nicholas the
second. She flayed her own parents for her merciless upbringing and proved to
the people that she would defeat all who came against her. Many fae died
without their mound to hide within—exposed to the Celampresians and humans—as anyone
who did not serve Marusya fled her rule. Too many didn’t make it out and more
never found their way to safety.
Immediately following
Queen Tarkovsky stepping down from the Soviet throne, Scarlet ordered the
execution of what amounted to be a hundred-thousand faerie folk, more than a
third of the population, earning her the title as the Scarlet Queen. The bloody
queen. She ran off to join the Celampresians as the revolutionaries gained greater
numbers than she had the strength to fight from within the mound. Her death
toll rose to a quarter million afterwards. Now, she works with the vampire
queen, searching for ways inside what was left of the independent mounds, for
the truth about her birth, and for a way to fix her mangled arm and return her
blade magick.
About the Author
Wife of a disabled veteran, Alisha Costanzo writes about PTSD, environmentalism, violence, and conformity. With a mutually-fueled passion to change the world one person at a time, she often writes about her husband’s rants, conspiracy theories, and trains of logic that seem absurd until the connections line up, and mixes them into her obsession with cooking, coffee, and pop-culture monsters.
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2 comments:
thanks for hosting
Thanks so much for both the book description and giveaway as well. I enjoy hearing about another good book.
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