Knights of the Sea by Paul Marlowe

I was first drawn to Knights of the Sea by the hilarious cover art. Now, having read the book, I can say two things: First, the art is accurate! Every element of the cover design — wolf, capsized boat, ghostly damsel, and lemon — is present in the plot. Second, the book is just as funny as the cover, and in a very good way.

In the previous The Wellborn Conspiracy book, Sporeville, Elliott Graven made a powerful enemy in the dastardly Professor Strange. As Knights of the Sea begins, he survives a murder attempt by one of Strange’s henchmen. He then arrives for a visit with his lycanthropic sweetheart, Paisley, hoping for a peaceful and idyllic summer to take his mind off mortal danger for a while. Instead, he finds that Paisley is smitten by a dashing German submarine builder and that yet another deadly plot is in ... Read More

Ether Frolics: Nine Tales from the Etheric Explorers Club by Paul Marlowe

The motto of Etheric Explorers Club, translated from the Greek, is “to seek, to discover, to return home.” These explorers dedicate themselves to investigating the ways in which the spirit world touches the physical world. Unfortunately for the explorers, most of these meetings between the spiritual and the physical are dangerous.

Paul Marlowe’s Ether Frolics is a collection of short stories that provide accounts of the explorations of the ether since the end of the Victorian era.

The stories are arranged in three groups of three, each of which comes with its own introduction. I particularly enjoyed the first set. These three stories all touch on the lives of outsiders at the birth of the modern era. My favorite in the collection was the first story, “Ten Golden Roosters.” Melissa Maddox se... Read More