We’re excited to share the cover for A Song for Quiet, book two in Cassandra Khaw’s Persons Non Grata dark fantasy series. Book one, Hammers on Bone, introduced the unusual occult detective John Persons, hired to hunt a monster. In this standalone story, Persons encounters a new threat that can summon inter-dimensional horrors through the magic of music.
Learn more about the novella and check out the full cover by artist Jeffrey Alan Love below!
A Song for Quiet publishes August 2017. From the catalog copy:
Deacon James is a rambling bluesman straight from Georgia, a black man with troubles that he can’t escape, and music that won’t let him go. On a train to Arkham, he meets trouble – visions of nightmares, gaping mouths and grasping tendrils, and a madman who calls himself John Persons. According to the stranger, Deacon is carrying a seed in his head, a thing that will destroy the world if he lets it hatch.
The mad ravings chase Deacon to his next gig. His saxophone doesn’t call up his audience from their seats, it calls up monstrosities from across dimensions. As Deacon flees, chased by horrors and cultists, he stumbles on a runaway girl, who is trying to escape her father, and the destiny he has waiting for her. Like Deacon, she carries something deep inside her, something twisted and dangerous. Together, they seek to leave Arkham, only to find the Thousand Young lurking in the woods.
The song in Deacon’s head is growing stronger, and soon he won’t be able to ignore it any more.
Author Cassandra Khaw had this to say:
A head is a crockpot of images, constantly bubbling over, slopping from the sides to come together into little story seeds. A Song for Quiet came about from a mix of things: the grossly under-appreciated Dark Seed computer game, Shawn James’ new album, a bit of Cherie Priest, a dash of John Hornor Jacobs’ Southern Gods which I reread yearly, inspiration from Fantasy Flight Games’ Arkham Horror tabletop games, and fever-flashes of a bluesman unable to sing for fear of what he might unleash.
Love’s cover is a little bit of all that and a lot of Persons non Grata.
I’m a little bit excited. Actually, no. I’m a million megawatts of holy-crap-excited. Both for this cover, which makes Deacon James look like the Pied Piper of Hamelin here, dragging behind him a horror older than time itself, and for the book itself. A Song for Quiet is one of the angriest things I’ve written, a story of grief and raging against the futility of the world, about – well, you’ll have to read it yourself.
Pre-order A Song for Quiet at the links below, or from your favorite retailer:
