Toward Ecosophy

I'm delighted to report that the second of my Ariel Moravec occult detective novels, The Book of Haatan, is now available for advance ordering and will be coming off the press in March 2024. For those of my readers who haven't been following along, this is the sequel to The Witch of Criswell, which started eighteen-year-old Ariel on her career as an occult investigator, under the guidance of her adept grandfather Dr. Bernard Moravec.

In this volume, it's the theft of an old and rare grimoire that starts the tale in motion. That grimoire, which contains spells for treasure hunting, might be linked to a quest for treasure left by a pirate centuries earlier. Ariel and her grandfather aren't the only ones looking for the treasure, however, and the other parties involved are more than willing to use deadly magic to get their way...

Interested?  You can order a copy in advance here.

Update 12/7/23:  The Book of Haatan is now available for preorder in the United States via Bookshop; you can order it here.

I'm very excited to announce the approaching publication of my latest novel, The Witch of Criswell: An Ariel Moravec Occult Mystery, due for release in April. This is the first volume of a new series, and heads off in a relatively new direction for me.

Occult detective stories go back nearly as far as detective stories themselves; as far as I know, the first occult detective story was Fitz James O'Brien's 1855 piece "A Pot of Tulips," which pits occult investigator Harry Escott against a ghost. William Hope Hodgson's "Carnacki the Ghost Finder" series, the first of which saw print in 1910, kickstarted the genre into motion, and there have been hundreds of other writers in the field since then, including serious occultists -- Dion Fortune and Aleister Crowley both published occult detective stories, for example.

One of the things that's irritated me about much of occult detective fiction, however, is that so many of its creators don't know enough about occultism to figure out which end of a wand to hold. It's understandable -- so many people don't have a clue that there's anything real going on in occultism, and so they treat it as a subset of fantasy and drag in all kinds of Harry Potteresque pseudomagical drivel -- but I can't help comparing it to the kind of really bad science fiction that ignores little things like the laws of physics. Nor is real magic any less useful as a plot engine than the fake variety. Dion Fortune's occult novels, in particular, make good use of actual magic; there are no Hollywood special effects in The Goat Foot God, for example, but there's still plenty of suspense and no shortage of plot.

I've always thought that the best way to get something to happen is to do it yourself. With that in mind, and with the enthusiastic help of Sphinx Press, a British fiction publisher, I've launched a new series with this book -- a sequence of occult detective novels in which all the magic is real. It's set in and around an East Coast city you'll have a hard time finding on a map -- Adocentyn, which (as you may not have learned in school) was founded in 1668 by Elias Ashmole and a group of his occultist friends -- and plunges the main character into a tangled case involving ghosts, witchcraft, and ceremonial magic. Here's the blurb:

"Eighteen-year-old Ariel Moravec doesn't expect much from a summer with the grandfather she hasn't met in years: a respite from her dysfunctional family, perhaps, and a brief delay before she has to face an uncertain future.  A few days after her arrival, however, she learns that her grandfather is an occult investigator tasked with hunting down the perils of the Unseen -- and he offers Ariel the chance to assist him on a case. Strange forces are stirring in the little farm town of Criswell, where a famous witch lived in colonial times. Has old Hepzibah Rewell's curse awakened, or is the evil magic the work of someone living? Caught in a tightening net of bitter local rivalries and strange happenings, Ariel has to find out...or her own life may be at risk."

The second volume in the series, The Book of Haatan, is complete in draft and will be on its way to the publisher as soon as I get a few final corrections done; it centers on magical treasure-hunting and the theft of a book of magic. The second, The Carnelian Moon, is in outline form; it's about lycanthropy -- not the fantasy variety, but the sort of thing that Eliphas Lévi discussed in Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic. There will be more. There's an overall story arc of sorts, but it's an open-ended series and should be a lot of fun.

Interested? If you're in the United States, The Witch of Criswell can be preordered here; elsewhere in the world, the publisher's website is your best bet.