Independent bookstores not only offer selections of quality books from non-mainstream writers, they also provide much-needed support for the communities they serve. I’m proud and honored to have my books carried by these stores. To find out the nearest merchant in your area or to purchase my books from online indie bookstores, click on the Indiebound links below.
SHORT FICTION
To purchase each story, click on the book covers to take you to the publisher’s site, where excerpts are also available. Please note that short stories are only available in e-book format.
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REVIEWS:
“Its message is universal and is delivered in a touching and magical way that inspires an immediate affinity with the characters and the story.” The Novel Approach for “The Haunted Glade”
“The cheerless atmosphere and a young man on the lunatic fringe infuse this story with the perfect balance of the disturbing and the romantic.” The Novel Approach for “Out of the Depths”
“The subtle twist at the end, the message that love is a power unto itself that will endure the test of time and prejudice is delivered in a way that truly is beautiful in its simplicity, but also profound in its significance.” The Novel Approach for “The Dollhouse”
RENFRED’S MASQUERADE
Young Nicola Gregori has always wanted to follow in the footsteps of his father, a brilliant clock-maker who’s famous for his wild, fantastical designs. But his father instead sends him to school to learn more practical matters. Nicola, stricken with infantile paralysis that left him with a deformed right leg, becomes an object of mockery and cruel jokes in school. He learns that in order to survive his daily ordeals, he needs to vanish in the crowd, to stop aspiring, to stop dreaming, and above all, to believe himself unworthy of respect and love.
Tragedy strikes when Nicola turns sixteen. Gustav Renfred, an old friend of his father, takes on Nicola as his charge and whisks him away to an isolated islet filled with empty mansions and bordered by a bluebell forest. There Nicola slowly learns about the tragic history that tightly weaves together the fates of Jacopo Gregori, Gustav Renfred, and Gustav’s twin sister, Constanza.
Magic, impossible dreams, and unrequited love come together in Ambrosi, the Renfreds’ mansion, where Nicola is caught up in a world of haunting portraits, a ghostly housekeeper, and the mysterious disappearance of Davide, Constanza’s adopted son. When Nicola’s invited to one of Renfred’s magical masquerades, he discovers the answers to riddles as well as the mounting danger that the Renfred family faces with every passing hour. With the masquerades’ existence depending on the physical and mental strength of an ailing Renfred, the task of solving the mystery of Davide’s disappearance before time runs out falls on Nicola’s shoulders, and he has no choice but to depend on things he’s long learned to suppress: courage, self-respect, and the desire to aim for impossible goals.
Queerteen Press (print) | Queerteen Press (e-book) | Indiebound
REVIEWS:
“The themes of the book are simple — coming of age, coming to terms with who you are, how you view yourself and how the world views you. But the themes are by no means simplistic; never once did I, as an adult, feel that the book talked down to me, thus I would imagine and hope that a young person reading it will not feel that way either.” Reviews by Jessewave
“Hayden Thorne’s writing is a love affair with language and symbolism, her books ones that engage the mind and envelope the senses. The settings are a breath of life, as much a part of the plot as the characters, becoming characters themselves that are wholly imperative to the narrative.” Top 2 Bottom Reviews
“Hayden Thorne is blessed with the ability to tell ageless stories; ageless because they are suspended in time, they can be a fantasy or an historical or even a contemporary setting or all of the previous, and ageless because they are fit as much for a young reader than for an adult one.” Elisa Rolle
ARABESQUE
Warning: This story contains some material that’s unsuitable for readers under 17. Please visit my other pages or check out updates on new titles above for age-appropriate LGBT fiction.
An ambitious young princess, Ulrike, turns to the dark arts in order to become queen despite her younger sister’s warnings of a fatal consequence to mortgaging her soul. She succeeds, yet Ulrike finds herself trapped in a hateful marriage, her mind slowly being devoured by her powers, while conceiving and giving birth to a boy.
Alarick—“the bastard prince”—becomes the court’s favorite object of mockery because of the scandal of his conception, his mother’s spiraling madness compounding his ordeal. When Alarick falls in love with a childhood friend, Roald von Thiessen, the added sin of an unnatural romance gets caught up in a tumultuous aristocratic environment that’s rife with hypocrisy, cruelty, betrayal, and murder.
Forcibly separated from each other during a bloody uprising, Roald and Alarick become helplessly ensnared in nightmarish adventures designed to twist their characters and destroy their minds in the process. The young lovers fight for their souls and a way back to each other in a world weighed down by the forces of dark and light magic, and where gods grapple with each other over mortal destinies.
Arabesque is a gothic, homoerotic retelling of the “Snow White” folktale, set in a darkly decadent, alternate Europe.
Smashwords (multi-format) | Amazon | Barnes and Noble
REVIEWS:
“Although it’s tagged as gay romance, it works better as a commentary on myths, magic and homophobia, as well as the underlying racism and classism of many of our most beloved Western folk stories, and their assumptions about romantic attraction and the divine right of kings, than as a straightforward love story.” Outlaw Reviews
NOTE: On April 4, 2011, I marked down the price of Arabesque to its permanent price of $1.99. Recent events in the YA market have made me seriously reconsider my plans to focus more on adult fiction in order to throw all my weight and support for LGBT Young Adult fiction. Thank you for your interest in my one and only experiment in writing adult speculative fiction.
