A treat today for those who like their fantasy dark with a splash of horror – we have an excerpt from Shaun Hamill’s upcoming novel THE DISSONANCE

As always, before we check out the excerpt, let’s find out what the author of A Cosmology of Monsters has in store for us next…

Four teenagers are thrust into a life of magic, secrecy and sacrifice in this captivating dark fantasy, perfect for fans of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower and The Shadow Glass by Josh Winning

It starts as an end-of-junior-school sleepover, but when Athena, Hal, Peter and Erin stumble across a missing boy, deep in the forests surrounding sleepy Clegg, Texas, they discover a world of sorcery and untold power. So begins a new life with the Dissonance, under the tutelage of Professor Elijah Marsh.

Twenty years later, separated and broken by their experiences, the friends are pulled back to Clegg for the anniversary memorial service at the town’s high school. Each carrying their own trauma, they come together once more to confront the legacy of their actions, and the monsters they failed to bury.

Hurled onto a collision course with the apocalyptic events of their past, Owen, a young man trapped in service to a murderous entity, and several lifetimes of mistakes, three unsuccessful adults and one frightened teen are all that stand between reality and oblivion.

The Dissonance is due for publication from Titan on 23rd July 2024. You can order your copy from:

Titan Books | Bookshop.org | Waterstones

Athena

A couple of hours after Hal Isaac throws up outside his lawyer’s office, Athena Watts teaches her sex magic seminar. It’s her most popular talk, for obvious reasons, and the one she offers most often. She can teach it on autopilot now, and for much of tonight, that’s what she’s done, filling the whiteboard with diagrams of magic circles and pronunciations of obscure words, while her mind mulls the meeting she has scheduled after closing.

Athena’s Books and Beans, her combination occult shop/café, is located in an old house in what most would call a “dangerous area” of Ashland, Oregon. The parking lot is more pothole than pavement, the front walk a series of broken concrete slabs. A seedy motel stands next door, and the housing projects are only three blocks away, but Athena’s never had trouble with her neighbors, and the shop draws a respectable crowd of customers most days.

Said customer base comprises a few overlapping groups: first, people who want a decent cup of coffee not from Starbucks; second, practicing Wiccans and dilettante occultists (people who believe magic can be discovered and practiced with rituals found on the internet or in mass-market publications); and third (and smallest), real-deal Dissonance users. The first group keeps the café full of paying customers. The second group drops disposable income on worry stones and spell kits, and also accounts for most of the students who enroll in the classes, which Athena holds on the second floor of the house. But it’s the third, secret group—the ones who know about the real power in this world—who keep the shop in the black. There’s money in rocks and herbs and penis-shaped candles, but there’s money in Dissonant artifacts and texts.

Garrett Thorpe, an old acquaintance and one of her most reliable dealers, called yesterday with a promise of something special. He’s prone to exaggeration, but he’s never offered her something she couldn’t move. Also, he’s good-looking for a white guy, and she never minds having his undivided attention for a little while.

Now, as her talk nears its end, she forces her thoughts away from those possibilities and back to the task at hand.

“Remember,” she says. “You perform the ritual under a full moon. Outside, in direct moonlight, or the spell won’t work. But if you get caught by kids with cameras or the police, you didn’t hear any of this from me, okay?”

The students laugh, even the ones who’ve taken this seminar before. The lame jokes make all the middle-class white women feel more comfortable. As a Black woman in a mostly white community, Athena has had a lifetime of practice making white people feel comfortable.

“And if this goes well and you end up rich and famous, maybe let me wet my beak a little, all right?” She rubs her thumb and forefinger together in the universal sign for Pay up, which prompts another round of good-natured laughter. Athena forces a smile at her own joke.

Garrett appears in the classroom doorway—tall, black-haired, in jeans, T-shirt, and a sports coat despite the weather. He looks like the white Hollywood leading man version of a college professor. He sees what’s happening, holds up a hand in apology, and backs out of sight. Athena turns toward the whiteboard but freezes as she catches her reflection in a darkened window: sleeves of her button-down shirt rolled up, brown hair barely contained by a scrunchie, Coke-bottle glasses in need of a good wipe-down. She’s never felt more like a middle-aged schoolmarm. She swallows a sigh as she faces the class.

“I don’t know why I started turning around,” she says. “I have nothing else to write. All this sex talk has me flustered, I guess. Thank you all for coming. I mean, thank you for attending. Attending.”

It’s a weak joke, but it earns a laugh and mild applause. Most of the crowd disperses, but a few students hang back to ask questions. Athena does her best to answer while shepherding everyone downstairs and out the front door. Her barista, Danni, does the same with the last of the coffee drinkers. After Athena locks the front door and flips the sign to “CLOSED,” she leaves Danni to clean up and returns upstairs to find Garrett in the classroom, studying the whiteboard.

“I don’t recognize any of this,” he says. “It’s Wiccan, not Dissonant.”

Athena has known Garrett since she was fifteen years old, when they met at a conference of Dissonants. He used to be a straight-up asshole, but in early middle age he’s mellowed into a likable blowhard. He’s from a Dissonant family, one of those rare lines where the talent passes reliably from generation to generation. Like most old Dissonant families, his is very wealthy. He doesn’t have to work, but he does anyway, traveling the world seeking and trading Dissonant texts and artifacts. Most of what he obtains, he sells to affluent collectors, but he offers smaller finds to shops like Athena’s. She sometimes wonders if he visits her so often out of a sense of pity, or if maybe there’s some- thing more behind his frequent appearances. His visits always feel fraught with possibility, although she’s never quite sure if the feeling is one-sided or not. Every time he visits, she inches closer to inviting him back to her place.

Garrett points to the board. “Does it work?” 

“Am I selling snake oil, you mean?”

“I didn’t mean it like that.”

“Yes you did. And yes, the ritual works, but not in the way you’re thinking.” She walks past him and wipes the board with an eraser. “It’s not a Dissonant command line. More like meditation. Directing your energies toward a goal.”

“Sounds hippie-dippie,” he says.

“To a snob, sure,” she says. “It’s like prayer. Hospital patients who pray recover faster than patients who don’t. It’s the layperson’s method of drawing power from the universe, or maybe the mind manifesting what it wants by directing its own strengths through some imagined external force.” She sets the eraser down.

“Sex magic,” Garrett says, his tone more considering. 

“Try it sometime,” Athena says.

“Couldn’t hurt.”

“Depends how you like your sex.” She doesn’t wait for his reaction, but heads downstairs.

After she bids Danni good night and watches to make sure the girl gets to her car okay, she and Garrett sit at one of the café tables, drinking beer instead of coffee. Garrett regales her with the story of his most recent adventure, something about a family of cannibals on Mount Nebo in Arkansas. She half-listens with a mix of jealousy and boredom. Garrett is a person impressed with his own experiences, and Athena hates herself a little for pretending to be impressed as well. It’s good business—if Garrett suspects she has a crush, he’ll underestimate or feel sorry for her, and give her a better price—but it’s more than that. This obnoxious blowhard also reminds her of another obnoxious blowhard she knew as a kid. One whom she liked much better.

By the time Garrett’s finished his second beer and third anecdote, Athena can’t keep her curiosity in check any longer. She drops the façade of polite interest and asks, “So what do you have for me?”

Garrett looks a little startled at the abrupt change in her manner, but rolls with it. He lifts his briefcase onto the table and unclasps it. He removes a gold disc the circumference of a small dinner plate, but thick and solid like a barbell weight. Intricate designs are etched on the surface, making it look a bit like a bronzed circuit board.

“The cannibals were using this as a beer coaster,” he says.

He cups his hands around the disc. Warm light shines from the designs on the surface—diffuse at first, and then coalescing into a swirling mass of colors, which then solidify into a three-dimensional image of a creature that could be an otherworldly woman. Her silvery skin shines like the moon, her eyes are solid black orbs, and her dark hair floats around her like she’s underwater. Gills ripple on her neck. Her black eyes make it difficult to read her expression, but Athena thinks the creature looks sad. Her right arm bears a dark birthmark in the shape of a spade.

“It’s a Dissonant painting,” Garrett says. “A creature called—” 

“An undine,” Athena says. “A cosmic elemental.” She scolds herself for interrupting, and for letting on she knows as much as she does. 

“You know your stuff,” he says, sounding impressed.

Athena chooses her next words with more care. “I thought the Dissonant community considered undine mythical. Part of the ‘Many Worlds’ heresy.”

“They are,” Garrett says. “Which is why I’m bringing this to you and not to a more upscale dealer. They’d consider it in bad taste. I thought I could count on your—and your clients’—discretion.”

He strokes the edge of the disc, and the image zooms in on the undine’s face. She looks familiar to Athena, like something from a dream.

“She seems unhappy,” Athena says.

“Because she knows she’s not real,” Garrett says. 

It’s a joke, but Athena can’t fake a laugh for him. She’s too exhausted after an evening of playing “teacher,” and anyway her curiosity has taken over now. Once she’s curious about something, it’s hard to be anything else. She puts her hands on the disc and swipes a few times, to examine the image from multiple angles.

“Who’s the artist?”

“If you were painting heretical images, would you sign your work? If I had to guess based on the design, I’d say it was done in the late ’70s or early ’80s, though.”

“I’ll take it,” Athena says. “Usual terms.” Meaning consignment. Fifty-fifty split on the proceeds. Garrett sets a minimum price, and Athena will negotiate anything on top of that.

“Cheers,” he says. They clink the necks of their beer bottles and drain the remains.

The Dissonance is due for publication from Titan on 23rd July 2024. You can order your copy from:

Titan Books | Bookshop.org | Waterstones