Showing results by narrator "Mark Jason Royse" in All Categories

White Limozeen (1989) was a commercial recovery after Dolly Parton's first major failure two years previously with the release of Rainbow. This book is a case study in how an album is sold and a persona constructed. The album had a complex relationship to the country music genre at a time when the genre was in the middle of major sonic and cultural shifts, and it represents how country music saw itself. This question of identity was especially relevant since White Limozeen was produced by Ricky Skaggs, the bluegrass prodigy who was in the middle of his own genre-widening experiments.

“Don’t give up! I’ll help you!” barks Rex, the hero of Władysław Reymont’s Revolt of the Animals (1924), “carried away with wrath and compassion” at the sight of his friend the old donkey with “his head covered in a hempen sack, being whipped by boys harrying him towards a pit of lime.” Who would not be roused to a righteous indignation at the sight of such wanton cruelty, inflicted upon a wise, sentient creature–for the perverse pleasure of man, that “crown and lord of all creation,” to whom dominion over this world was supposedly given by the Lord at the dawn of creation?

The story of Persephone and Hades and their beautiful marriage, distant and old, wrapped up in centuries of misconceptions and lies, finally retold as it really was. Without Demeter's lies, the Olympian's cruel jokes, and so many other distortions, we finally see the beauty, the softness, and the tragic resolution brought on by outside forces.

David is shy to a fault, introverted, and doesn’t know how to defend himself. That’s why he keeps toiling away at his job, even if his boss is malicious. Mick, a member of the Kinsmen, a motorcycle club for those of Nordic descent, gets a flat on his motorcycle, so he stops at a tire shop he’d never used before to get it fixed. There he meets David, who he finds attractive, and thinks about asking him out before his boss enters the garage in his normal, abusive fashion.

A novel written in cyberspace, Nearly Roadkill is an Infobahn erotic thriller without any boundaries - virtual, sexual, legal, or otherwise. What-appears-to-be Boy meets what-appears-to-be Girl. But their world is the Net, where any persona - and any gender - can be created.

The second in the Oaths of Dante series, watch as Dante strives to fulfill the oaths presented to him by Gaia and Hecate. Will he and Christopher find peace as werewolves or will they fall to the Hatred of Zeus lingering in the dark magic of his curse. Can they, together, find salvation? Can they survive the hate of eons, hidden away by the kindly faces of those claiming to be friends?