When I received Wolfgrove Media’s submission call for grimdark short stories surrounding a sinister, blood-eating book that reveals morally questionable choices to its reader, dude … I was all in!

The concept’s full of metaphysical possibilities. Further, I’ve been itching to write another supernatural historical fiction piece centered around Jean-Claude Bouchard, a character I wrote about in another contest last year. I thought it’d be a natural fit.

When I write Jean-Claude stories, they’re usually described as “Indiana Jones Meets Dan Brown” — they’re set in Nazi-occupied France between 1940-1945; I include a great deal of Christian theology and dogma; and I sprinkle in some Masonic mysteries for seasoning. They’re super fun for me to write for because they entail a lot of research and a bit of bending of actual truth.

In this story, we join Jean-Claude in April 1944 in Le Puy-en-Velay, a few months before Normandy, where he’s called upon to help recover intelligence vital to the French Resistance. It’s there, in the ancient chapel Saint-Michel d'Aiguilhe, that he encounters the Book of Choices.

I hope it does well and makes it into Wolfgrove’s anthology! I’ll update this page as I learn more — results are due July 2024, I think. Fingers crossed!

Update: 2024.07.01

Great news! Wolfgrove Media has accepted the story! It will be included in the first volume of their upcoming anthology, due in October 2024.

R