New Release – The Miraculous Life of Rupert Rocket – Mark Salzwedel

QSFer Mark Salzwedel has a new queer fantasy book out: The Miraculous Life of Rupert Rocket.

In 1942, Rupert Rocket’s grandmother was cursed by an Irish fairy, the Pooka, to end her bloodline.

But the Pooka’s sister, the Grogoch, blessed the boy to counteract the curse.

As a young gay man, Rupert’s life spins wildly between the competing spells through adventures as a dancer, a model, an actor, and a spy…

But what will happen when the blessing runs out?

Get It At Amazon | Publisher

Excerpt

Mike had been introduced to the Grogoch one weekend when Rupert was ten and off with Haley and Trevor. The Grogoch, as he described it, was the Irish fairy who had blessed Rupert on the day he was born for twenty-five years. Once Rupert’s twenty-five years were up, she had moved on and blessed Mike a few days earlier. His business immediately picked up, and he got a promotion. He volunteered to help Rupert out, and Rupert remembered what Roger had told him. After eating, the three men went back into the restaurant’s tiny office to work out the language of their partnership.

Rupert met with Ingrid several times before the double funeral. She helped him go through his mother’s things. He told her to sell or give away most of his mother’s possessions except the journals she had kept religiously from her teen years. He studied those journal entries and some letters between his grandparents he found in the dining room to slowly piece together the story of the Grogoch and the Pooka. His grandfather had died when his grandmother’s twenty-five- year blessing had run out, and his mother and grandmother died when his own blessing ran out.

The troubling, niggling fact that he was still coming upon ghostly and solid- seeming images of the past didn’t make sense. If his blessing had run out on his twenty-fifth birthday, why did he still have such an extraordinary ability?

On the morning of the funeral, Rupert decided he was ready to enter the master bedroom, and he immediately regretted the decision as soon as the first images took shape. His grandmother looked panicked, lying in bed reaching toward the ceiling with her arms trying to grasp something above her that was just beyond her fingertips. And then clutching at her chest and lying still. His mother entering the bedroom, rushing to the bed, and checking for her mother’s pulse was just as heartbreaking. She didn’t want to believe it was true. Her expression conveyed the fear of being trapped and alone. She left to let Trevor’s mom in, and the two women wept and tried to comfort each other for a while. In the brief time when his mother was again alone, Rupert saw her teeter unsteadily on her feet, and fall to the floor. Rupert decided to back out and close the door, because he couldn’t watch any more of it.

At the funeral, Rupert tried to socialize with the restaurant employees and all the cousins, aunts, and uncles who arrived from as far away as Colorado. He knew his father was not going to attend, but he was surprised that Mike showed up. Mike told him that he hadn’t seen the Grogoch again since they had talked, but he would pass along Rupert’s desire to speak with her. Rupert joined some of his cousins as pallbearers and rode to the cemetery with Ingrid.

When they arrived, a small crowd was already ringing the two graves in a familiar part Rupert’s grandmother had taken him to—his grandfather’s grave. All of the Kellermans together again, Rupert mused. He wondered how long the Pooka’s curse would torture him until it finished him off.

As if on cue, he scanned the crowd as the caskets were being lowered into the graves, and standing somewhat off to the side was the short, disfigured woman he remembered seeing both at the bus terminal in Milwaukee and on the street corner on the way home from Trevor’s at fifteen. It has to be the Pooka, Rupert concluded. His mother’s journal had mentioned the short stature, the graying red hair, one eye lower than the other, and the crooked nose. She wore the same wool coat as when he’d first met her, but without the earmuffs, as it was a warm enough day for the snow to start melting, leaving patches of brown grass exposed around the graves.

She had a smirk on her face and didn’t break eye contact when Rupert stared at her.

Author Bio

Mark Salzwedel is a gay writer and editor living in New York City. His short stories have appeared in literary magazines and anthologies, and his previous novel is The Lever (Queer Space Books, 2022).