Category:  Historical Fiction Publisher: Lost Continent Library ISBN-10:  0972747249 Type: Fiction Pages: 158 Copyright: 2003, 1st printing Jan 2004 ISBN-13: 9780972747240 In 1872, adventurer and military intelligence officer Julius Corbin leads a small expedition into Brazil and they are abducted to a lost city of Amazons where they encounter the lusty and ruthless queen. This is a pulp adventure novel for mature readers. It features elements of horror, romance and sexual situations against a backdrop of classic adventure. It is the first of five novels featuring the protagonist Julius Corbin, the second of which is Tropic of Despair (2005). My objective with this series is to create edgy genre fiction for mature readers, what I like to call 'New Pulp'. My works are the raciest fiction my company publishes. Everything else can be read pretty much by all audiences. The sample here is more PG-13. Excerpt And then they came. The lost dead. The heavy silence was broken by the gentle splashing in the brackish waters, as they followed the scent of the blood beckoning them from their sleepless hell. Up from Hades they had arisen, and very thirsty. Just the sound of their movement brought bumps to Corbin’s skin, but when the first of them emerged close enough to the edge of the light to be seen, Corbin was struck pallid with fear. “Oh my god...” It was one thing to sit at night alone by the firelight and tease one’s nerve with fantasies – but it was all too unsettling to willfully enter the land of the damned, surrounded by ghouls as real as the hairs standing on the back of your neck. Even a brave soldiering man like Corbin felt his knees losing their resolve and his bladder threatening to unloose. The sight was incomparably bad for the mind. He felt himself drop to the ground and his shaking hand unsheath the machete, as the dead drew even closer to the pit of blood. There was a young girl, still aching from her first agony at the hands of her rapacious murderer. She was followed by an old man weeping in eternal sorrow over the evils he had all too willingly followed here, and a woman of middle years gnashing her teeth in anguish at the curses that loosed the grip on her mind and drove her to her damning treacheries against her defenseless children--pale and dark- eyed, clinging to her ragged skirt, starving for the nourishment of the  blood. Soon, there were several more of these withering, pale faced wraiths, reaching out for the pit of offering. Gathering enough of his wits to remember his purpose, Corbin brandished his sharp weapon to forbid the shambling legion from drinking the blood until they had paid him the fee of Hephaistos’ golden coins. One by one, they approached. The girl first, her cold grey hand holding out a golden coin shining in the dim lantern light. She stared at him with the dark pits of her dying, sinking eyes as he carefully reached out and took the coin from her. He lowered the blade a bit and indicated she could take her fill. The sight of the white-fleshed bony girl, barely covered by her dirty, rotting coffin shroud, dropping to her knees and lowering her face to the pool of blood like an animal was just not something anyone should ever have to have seen. The sound of her slurping and gulping sickened Corbin and he paid his attention to the old man, wide- eyed in anticipation for his share, and the cursed mother ready to forsake her children’s thirst to sate her own. Taking coins from them, he indicated with a shaky wave of his machete that they, too, could drink from the pit. If it were to be even this easy, the gathering of these coins would forever haunt Corbin’s memory. But fate had more in store for him, perhaps to mercifully emphasize his remaining opportunity to avoid damnation. Possessing five of the requisite eighteen coins, Corbin did his best not to look directly in their dark forever-staring eyes the others who came, as they lined up to pay their fee for a taste of fresh blood. Six, seven, eight, nine, ten – the coins filled his shaky hand. One by one, the wretched undead took their place, face down in the pool, sucking mouthfuls of Califia’s warm, thickening blood. It was a horrid sight, but not as memorable as that to come, for there were eight more coins to be collected, and there were more ghouls in the shadows, their approach heralded by their sluggish steps through the stagnant black water. Corbin managed a bare grip on his sanity as more approached. Eleven, twelve, thirteen – the tally mounted. He could soon leave this place, but not yet. The pool was now crowded. There was one on each side of Califia’s corpse, lapping noisily. Fourteen, fifteen – Hephaistos’ golden currency managed a shimmer in the dim lantern light. Corbin secured them to his pants pocket. Only three more to gather... And then the cards were played. At the very moment Corbin was realizing that he was there alone with fifteen bloodthirsty wraiths, there came two more figures from the darkness. The first was a large and brutish man and when his pale tormented features became clear in the lantern’s glow, Corbin caught his own breath. There was no mistake that Corbin knew this  man, for the gaping wound in the brute’s chest was most familiar. Mungo McShane! Mungo had come straight here the moment he breathed his last on the pier in San Francisco, his blood dripping off Corbin’s sword. He looked at Corbin with slack eyes, recognition of no apparent concern. In his giant beefy hand, Mungo extended a shimmery golden coin. His primary need was for the hope of nourishment fresh blood promised. Though his appearance was startling, it appeared he was no threat. Corbin took the coin and waved the big man toward the crowded pool. But Mungo did not move to join the others yet. Instead, he stepped aside and looked back to the darkness. And there emerged a solitary figure, slender and lithe, bony and blue with grave rot. The shredded gown barely covered the skeletal legs, dying flesh stretched over them like hellish stockings. One breast sagged like an empty leather bag, exposed through a large tear in the mocking garment. The nipple was gnarled and blackened. This figure, once a woman, held out a bony arm covered in taut blued skin, and offered her golden fee in the palm of her aging hand, a diamond ring hanging loose from one finger. In her other arm, she carried a small rounded bundle, obscured in shadow. But it was not merely this which caused Corbin’s knees to give out. It was the dead woman’s voice. “Julius... I have missed you.” Corbin could not have imagined anything so frightful to gaze upon as that face which stared at him now. Bluish skin stretched taut over a skull, its hair stringy, thinning and matted with the filth of Hell. The smile of green rotting teeth offered as if a gift of pearly beauty. None of this, nor anything he had seen yet in this forsaken place, matched the the unsettling horror of the eyes: They were blackened with death, like the sickening gelatinous orbs of a fish left to rot in the sun, and bulging slightly from dark, sinking sockets. The pupils seemed a bright red pinpoint in the lantern’s glow, and aimed right at him. Demonic as her appearance was, Corbin was terror-stricken in his recognition of the woman, and he dropped to sit on the ground, barely able to hold the wavering machete, his other arm across his abdomen, as if to hold his nerve within. Helene Dellacapri! Once the most heavenly beauty he had ever laid eyes upon, she was now the most disturbing and ghastly wretch his mind could conceive. What had happened to her? What had brought her to this place? Under other circumstances, his clear mind could readily answer those questions, for her character had proven damnably flawed. But sitting in this place, in the darkness, the slurping of blood echoing all around, Corbin could only stare at this  frightful wraith and wonder why he did not just run screaming, out of his mind. He suddenly wondered if he would be able to get back onto his feet before they were finished. Helene had not changed in one way. “Oh, Julius, you have come to see me. I always believed that you still held me in some corner of your heart. Now, you are here!” Corbin managed to respond, “Helene... What happened to you?” The ghoulish woman’s eyes left him for a moment and looked off somewhere into another place and time. “I suppose you were right about Stefan and me. We did get what we deserved...”

Redlands Daily Facts, 2006
From feature article on me and my company:
“Secret of the Amazon Queen” is definitely for mature readers. It begins a new line for the publishing company that will include a series of books featuring adventure hero Julius Corbin. “He's sort of my homage to Robert E. Howard's Solomon Kane,” Bosley said.

In “Amazon Queen,” Corbin and a small group of fellow explorers find themselves in a lost world, deep inside the Matto Grosso jungle. What they discover is both intriguing and disturbing in the fun, but very frothy adventure tale." - Steve Sabel, Town Editor



David Hatcher Childress, Adventures Unlimited Press
"Dark and original -- Talbot Mundy meets Stephen King!"