It's 2017 and the End Days are coming, beings that were once human gathering to fight in one last great war for control of the Vellum - the vast realm of eternity on which our world is just a scratch. But to a draft-dodging Irish angel and a trailer-trash tomboy called Phreedom, it's about to become brutally clear that there's no great divine or diabolic plan at play here, just a vicious battle between the hawks of Heaven and Hell, with humanity stuck in the middle, and where the easy rhet...

Are you prepared to enter acclaimed author Hal Duncan's world of scruffians and scamps and sodomites? Beware, for it is filled with the gay pirate gods of Love and Death, immortal scoundrels, and young men who find themselves forced to become villains. But who amongst us does not adore a gamin antihero? These fantastical tales from the fringes of an imaginative realm of supernatural fairies and human fey will captivate the reader. Light a smoke, raise a cup of whiskey, and seek a careful s...

Hal Duncan shattered the boundaries between genres with his stunning debut novel, Vellum, which shocked with the boldness of its ideas, seduced with the sensual beauty of its prose, and astonished with its imaginative sweep. Now Duncan returns with another epic tour de force that surpasses all expectations.Once, in the depths of prehistory, they were human. But in a moment of brutal transfiguration, they became unkin, beings who possessed the power to alte...

It's twenty years since the Evenfall swept across the Vellum and the bitmites took reality apart, twenty years since Phreedom Messenger disappeared into the wilderness and Seamus Finnan was imprisoned in his own past. Twenty years of chaos but the Dukes, the remnants of the Covenant, still cling to power in their enclaves of order in the bitmite-devastated wilderness . . . in their Havens in the Hinter.Across the folds of time and space, though, rogues and rebels are rising up agai...

Waifs of history put under the Stamp. Fixed imperishable to skivvy forever for the groanhuffs. Scarpered to live wild, fight back, liberate every scruff still in chains.Orphans, foundlings, latchkey kids...It's over a century now since the Scruffians nicked the Stamp, done for the last of the Waiftaker Generals, and brung down the whole bleeding Trade. Still, there's cribs being raided & scruffs being scrobbled, which means there's comeuppances cal...

Acclaimed author and critic Hal Duncan turns his analytic eye towards the development and current state of speculative fiction in the pages of Rhapsody. Duncan's trademark wry humor and suffer-no-fools approach to critiquing the genre will make this book more than a resource for students of the field—anyone who enjoys reading tales of the fantastical and strange can find Duncan's insight worthwhile to read again and again."Rhapsody, though it is Duncan's first long-form critical wo...

This novella-length collection of Erehwynan Idylls offers readers an indulgent and weird agglomeration of randy boys and revelations, as the embodiment of a small breeze--actually the gene-spliced child of the gods Zephyros and Ares--flirts and seduces fleshlings on a terraformed future Mars. Hal Duncan's acclaimed style is both alethic and erudite and offers a fresh telling of philosophical musings and classic Greek mythology for 21st century readers.""This densely lyrical novella...

An extraordinary, incendiary debut from a rare new talent, Vellum showcases a complex and sophisticated level of writing coupled with a fecund imagination that defies description.It’s 2017 and angels and demons walk the earth. Once they were human; now they are unkin, transformed by the ancient machine-code language of reality itself. They seek The Book of All Hours, the mythical tome within which the blueprint for all reality is transcribed, which has bee...

Sexy, secretive, yet clear-eyed, Duncan brings pop, high, and low cultures together in one handy sometimes amusing sometimes harsh A-to-Z which every bibliophile and armchair adventurer will find to be a necessary guidebook through the temerarious pages of international literature.

Urchins scrobbled down the centuries from yer poor and persecuted. Foundlings Fixed in imperishable waifhood by the Stamp & sold to rich groanhuffs as child labour. Hellions with spirits as resilient as their flesh, less like to cower from a kick than nick yer boot, hamstring yer and fuckin leg it. That's what it is to be a Scruffian, mate, and there ain't a rhyme sung or tale told in a Scruffian squat that ain't, at the end of the day, out to learn yer how to survive. So cosy in, scamps, ...

Collecting twelve new works from the author of Vellum, Ink, Testament, & Songs for the Devil and Death, this chapbook takes the razing of Sodom as origin myth for all queers, gathers its toolkit of forms and conceits, from every corner of verse & song, old & new, to forge a passionate call to arms, a manifesto for art in the face of loss & surl.

Fixed imperishable by the Stamp, sold as slaves, escaped to run wild, fight dirty and plot revenge, Scruffians might look no more'n filthy guttersnipes, but it's a daft groanhuff who crosses em. From the Children's Crusades to the chimney sweeps of Ripper Vicky's London, from Jack Scallywag to the Beast of Buskerville, Scruffians have learnt the hard way to carry a shiv and mind yer mate's back. We'll learn you too, scamp, with these fabbles of Liberatings and Come-Uppances, carnival carna...