Amazonas

Amazonas: A Novella
by Alan Peter Ryan

Featuring stunning full-color cover artwork by Tomislav Tikulin

About the Book:
The river, the river. She thought it would never end...

They were in search of The Slave Tree, and this had been a mistake. As the boat traveled up the river, deep into the heart of darkness, Henrietta watched Edwin closely. She watched him chew at his fingernails and spit into the river. She watched a vein in his temple that never stopped throbbing and the tic that made a muscle twitch beside his eye. She watched Edwin and the man named Crown whispering some secret, back and forth, as if Crown was hypnotizing Edwin.

The most frightening part of this insane journey was not the fear of losing her husband. She had passed beyond fearing that. But if she did lose Edwin, here, so far upstream from the last outpost of civilization, surrounded by the green-walled forest and the dark and tangled terrors it contained, what in the name of God would become of her?

There were things moving about the jungle, and there was a madman waiting for them at the end of their journey... and then, most importantly, there was The Slave Tree, which held a secret so dark it could drive a person mad.

Amazonas is a piercing look into the true of heart of darkness into which many men enter... and few ever return.

"...reads like a fantastically lucid fever dream.  A surreal journey, it works a hallucinatory magic by blurring the lines between reality and horror, taking the reader on a journey deep into the jungles of the Amazon, where the normal rules of civilization and humanity have no meaning.   The horror here is all too real: the cruelty of slavery, the lust and hunger of ordinary men driven to fever pitches, the inability of feeble human good to do anything to stop it... The ending is fast and furious, but again: this feels loyal to the tone of the story, that violence is fast and brutal, and the natural world around it indifferent of the outcome."
— Shroud magazine

Alan Peter Ryan was the author of four novels and two collections of short stories and novellas and the editor of five anthologies. He was nominated for the John W. Campbell Award and three times for the World Fantasy Award, and won a World Fantasy Award for The Bones Wizard. He also edited five anthologies of travel writing for which he won a Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Award. As a journalist, he wrote for all the major newspapers of the United States and for many magazines, including Smithsonian, The American Scholar, Islands, Travel & Leisure, and Playgirl.

Published in two states:
• Hardcover Limited Edition of 1,000 signed copies bound in full-cloth and Smyth sewn ($35)
• Traycased Hardcover Lettered Edition of 26 signed and lettered copies bound in leather and Smyth sewn with a satin ribbon page marker ($175)

Excerpt... coming soon

Artwork