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PLEASE WELCOME MY FRIEND, A MAN WITH A THOUSAND ARMS
SCIENCE FICTION AUTHOR
MARK ILESS
I’m thrilled that my friend Kathleen has joined in with the blog tour. As another Solstice author she and I have chatted often and she also helped to promote my first novel, A Pride of Lions. Author of September Wind Kathleen is a wonderful writer and someone with incredible potential, so keep your eyes open for works by Kathleen Janz Anderson!
Author Bio
Mark works for Southampton University, and also as a freelance writer in many fields including copywriting. His short stories have been published in Back Brain Recluse, Dream, New Moon, Auguries, Haunts, Kalkion, Screaming Dreams, and the anthologies Right To Fight, Escape Velocity, Auguries and Monk Punk. With an 8th Degree Black Belt in Taekwondo he’s also written non-fiction for Combat, Taekwondo & Korean Martial Arts, Fighters, Junk, Martial Arts Illustrated, profwritingacademy.com and calmzone.net.
His first full length work was Kwak’s Competition Taekwondo, and he also has a short story collection available entitled Distant Shores. His debut novel A Pride of Lions was published by Solstice in September 2013, followed shortly afterwards by 4 novellas: A Connoisseur of the Bizarre, Sally Jane, Nightshade and Santa Claws is Coming. The Cull of Lions is Book II in The Darkening Stars series. He’s now focusing on the third book in this series, The Roar of Lions.
Blurb:
Selena Dillon and her team return to Loreen after their attack on Mantis, only to find the myriad worlds of Mankind once again plunged into war. As the Penal Regiments are betrayed by the Federation of Man, and fighting spills throughout the galaxy, the dreaded Manta raise their heads once again.
Selena soon finds herself trying to track down her friends’ daughter, Hope, from the rabbit holes of Loreen and then fights to free her home planet from alien invaders.
While a general amnesty means previous sins are forgiven, the Queen has not forgotten Selena’s attempt on her life. Selena soon finds herself torn between obeying orders to protect the monarch, and her ravening thirst for revenge. But strange forces are stirring amidst the stars and Mankind finds itself with surprising new allies, while a terrifying enemy that’s manipulated events from behind the scenes finally reveals itself for the very first time.
In this excerpt Selena comes face to face with a horror from Capulet’s past, creatures that have haunted the colonists’ nightmares since First Landing.
Excerpt
Selena was awoken by an insane yelping, which turned to a deafening banshee scream. Fighting her way out of the sleeping bag Selena snatched up her machine gun, just as long knee-high dark shapes leapt over the skimmers and ploughed into the stirring men.
“Swords!” Selena shouted, dropping her gun as she grabbed the Katana from the ground next to her sleeping bag. The long blade swept into the night and glinted in the light of the twin moons. The last thing she needed was her men firing blindly into their own ranks. A dark shape before her raised itself as if out of nowhere and stretched towards her face. The creature stood on rear and middle legs, a set of paws from a third and front set reached for her as it opened its jaws, revealing shark-like teeth dribbling with pendulous strings of gluey saliva. Jumping to her right Selena swung the mighty blade in a hissing arc down to her left. It connected with a solid thunk and then slipped through whatever she’d hit. There was a gibbering scream as something monstrous dropped to the grass, where it scrabbled insanely for a moment and then stilled.
“Lights!” she bellowed skipping backwards, her eyes dancing in all directions with her sword held ready in both hands. As the hovering skimmers illuminated the whole area Selena bulked, it couldn’t be…Creatures that resembled a cross between some form of long, hip-high six-legged rabid dog and a very wide cat blinked black eyes that were almost lost in short dark fur at the sudden light, then they turned tail and ran, bounding easily over the circle of skimmers and sank back into the night-cloaked forest.
“If anyone has an idea what those were,” Kes gasped. “I’d like to know. I’ve never seen anything like that before”
“Monsters from the past,” Selena replied, shuddering and still unable to believe her eyes, “They’re lenars.”
“Jesus, that’s all we need,” Kes said, eying the one Selena had cut clean in half.
Selena wiped her blade and looked at him. “When the colonists first came here these things tore them to pieces. We knew nothing about them initially, because they have a low heat signature and so weren’t picked up by thermal imaging. They sleep during the day, digging deep into the ground and covering themselves when the sun rises, and so the flybys didn’t spot them. They diurnal, but prefer to hunt in the dark.”
Selena told them about the unfortunate first explorers who had decided to camp right on top of a whole pack of them. She remembered being told at school that all the others found was blood, pieces of bone and their equipment. She was silent for a moment, then added, “That’s why Capulet City’s perimeter defence was kept, to defend us against them, while other worlds that didn’t face such threats soon changed the standard base design.”
“So how come we weren’t warned about them?” Braxis asked, looking about nervously
“Because we thought we’d killed them all off,” Selena replied. “No one’s seen them for centuries.”
Buy Links:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Cull-Lions-Darkening-Stars-Book-ebook/dp/B00LG74IGS
http://solsticepublishing.com/the-cull-of-lions/
Social Media Links:
Amazon author’s page: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Mark-Iles/e/B004YZBP3I
Website: www.markiles.co.uk
Twitter: www.twitter.com/welcometoearth
Facebook author’s page: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Mark-Iles/279162705557698
1 reply on “The Cull Of Lions by Mark Iles: @welcometoearth #ScienceFiction @SolsticeShadows”
Kathleen is a great author and friend. I loved her novel ‘September Wind’.