Mslexia Magazine hosts a writing competition in the UK for unpublished novels every year. My YA novel Soul Strife was longlisted in the 2022/3 comp. Winners can be found here
See below for Soul Strife blurb and chapter extract.
Sixteen (and ten months) year old Yasha Alukov is bored. Forced to live with distant relatives in a strange town full of overly friendly ghosts and incredibly boring magic users who refuse to cast even the tiniest of curses, life begins to pick up when Yasha discovers his cousin owes a bunch of mobster necromancers a lot of money. Then the dashing Rosharvin – a soulmancer with the ability to control the dead – offers him a deal: help Rosharvin break his shapeshifting best friend, Enid, out of a maximum security magical prison guarded by a battalion of super powered demi-gods, and he’ll help Yasha take on the mob.
Naturally, Yasha says ‘yes’, and naturally this is only the start of his troubles.
An LGBT love story full of crime, misdemeanour and zombie race horses, Soul Strife is the first book in the Seraphim Chronicles involving a crew of teenage delinquents who firmly believe that with great power comes great irresponsibility!
(Sometimes you have to destroy the world to save it, sometimes you just do it anyway.)
Below is an extract of Soul Strife Chapter One:
The grey dead looked at Yasha through the window. It pressed its featureless face to the glass, lidless red eyes glowing. Dark, purplish smoke made up its body, swirling like oil over water. Pausing with spatula in hand, sausages spitting in the pan, Yasha scowled at the grey. It waved at him, twinkling ridiculously long, tapered fingers.
Setting the spatula down, Yasha flipped off the hob – his not-uncle Danil wouldn’t like it if he burned the kitchen down – and stepped to the window over the sink. ‘Go away,’ he told the grey. ‘Whatever he sent you for, you’re wasting your time. I don’t care what your master has to say.’
He could see his own reflection in the glass, stark against the wash of night reflected in the pane. His black hair was sticking up from the constant run of his hands and his eyes, black all-around like all dyet boi, otherwise known as the “god-sighted”, were narrow and suspicious. His mouth was pinched. He looked vaguely constipated. At least he couldn’t see the scar looping around his neck in the glass. He blinked, remembering the bite of the knife.
As if mimicking him, the grey’s eyes flashed in a wink, bright as embers. It was difficult to read expression in a face with no mouth, nose, or human bone structure, but Yasha had practice reading the swirly patterns in the soul vapour marbling its head. He thought it looked hopeful. Lifting a long, spindly arm, the grey brandished a battered bouquet of daffodils in a cone of newspaper.
Yasha recoiled from the window, cheeks flushing. ‘No way.’ He pinched the bridge of his nose and wished Rosharvin Dregovich to the fiery depths of the Pit. This was an all-time low, even for him. ‘How are you even holding those?’ he asked the grey. Grey dead fed on life force. The flowers should be withered and dead. The grey blinked at him, entirely mute. Yasha knew it was shamming. The dead could talk when they wanted.
Against his better judgement, he had to admit it, he was intrigued. The newspaper had to be charmed, he decided. A spell was the only explanation. But where had Rosharvin found a dyet boi willing to work magic for him? None of the community here in Danitz would help him. They were all like his not-aunt Racia and not-uncle Danil; too straitlaced and well-mannered to deal with soulmancers. Especially young, nervy one’s who wore too much green, doused themselves in floral cologne and smiled too wide.
Yasha sucked air through his teeth, biting back his frustration. Pit take him, he wished he’d been born with a sensible bone in his body. Instead, curiosity had him in a stranglehold. He wanted a look at the spell on the bouquet, which was probably why Rosharvin had the grey bring it. Still, knowing something was a bad idea had never once, in his sixteen-and-ten-months of life stopped him from doing anything ever. It surely wasn’t going to stop him now.
ALDLIS CHRONICLES 