New Paranormal Romance

Amber Quill Press has just released my new paranormal romance with Lovecraftian elements, SEALING THE DARK PORTAL:

Sealing the Dark Portal

I really like this cover. The butterfly is heroine Rina's familiar, a jeweled ornament on a pendant that comes to life. Rina is an alien in a sense, because, although human, she comes from a different space-time continuum. But at the beginning of the story she doesn't know that. Almost everything she remembers about her past is an illusion. Although she thinks she has lived an ordinary life in our world, in fact two years earlier she fled here from her homeland with her memories altered for her own protection. Now the creatures from the void between dimensions that overran her world have pursued her here. She must regain her memories and her magical ability in order to defeat them. Moreover, an enemy sorcerer has tracked her from their devastated homeland and plans to open a portal onto the void in our world also.

I gave Rina a werecat bodyguard who came across with her to watch over her in secret. When she meets him and her true memories awaken, she also has to deal with memories of the past intimacy they shared. He has the power to take three forms—human, domestic cat, or cougar (mountain lion). I had fun with him and with Rina's very assertive butterfly familiar.

The spark for this novel was the concept of two people who'd known each other in a different world meeting again in this one, while one of them doesn't remember the former life. Yes, the "false memory" motif has appeared in lots of fantasy fiction, but the example that inspired me was the brief scene at the end of Stephen King's Dark Tower saga, when Susannah and Eddie find themselves safe in New York with new identities and new lives ahead of them. How did those lives play out, I wondered? Suppose a comparable pair of characters discovered they weren't safe after all?

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt