QSFer E.H. Lupton has a new MM urban fantasy out (bi, gay): Dionysus in Wisconsin.
A graduate student and an archivist fight a god.
Fall, 1969. Ulysses Lenkov should be working on his dissertation. Instead, he’s developing an unlucrative sideline in helping ghosts and hapless magic users. But when his clients start leaving town suddenly—or turning up dead—he starts to worry there’s something afoot that’s worse than an unavenged death or incipient insanity. His investigation begins with the last word on everyone’s lips before they vanish: the mysterious Dionysus.
Sam Sterling is an archivist who recently moved back to Madison to be closer to the family he’s not too sure he likes. But his peaceful days of teaching library students, creating finding aids, and community theater come to an end when the magnetic, mistrustful Ulysses turns up with a warning. There’s a god coming, and it looks like it’s coming for Sam.
Soon the two are helping each other through demon attacks, discovering the unsavory history of Sam’s family, and racing to find a solution that doesn’t lead to heartbreak and death. But as the year draws to a close, they’ll face a deadly showdown as they try to save Sam—and the city itself.
Dionysus in Wisconsin is the first in a new series of urban fantasy/historical M/M romances set in Madison, WI in the late 1960s/early 1970s. It doesn’t end on a cliffhanger and can be read as a stand-alone.
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Excerpt
Ulysses made it back to the elevator, tucking his notes into an internal pocket. The hall was growing dim as the sun began to creep toward the horizon outside, and the elevator took an interminable time to come when he called it. The long hallway, all linoleum and flickering fluorescent lights, felt suddenly cold. Ulysses frowned.
The elevator slid open and he stepped in.
In general, ghosts did not wander campus buildings. There was no specific reason for this other than that students tended to be young and fairly healthy, so there weren’t a lot of deaths. But sometimes buildings could develop a kind of rudimentary self-possession. Ulysses didn’t know if that was indeed what was happening, but it felt like something was trying to get through to him. There was a sense of tension in the atmosphere, like the breeze before a thunderstorm. The elevator crawled downward slowly, creaking as it went.
On the fourth floor, the door opened, and Sam was standing there.
Ulysses jumped before he realized that Sam was corporeal.
“Sorry, Lenkov,” Sam said, rubbing the back of his neck. “I didn’t mean to—I’ll get the next one.”
“No!” Ulysses reached out and held the door. “You just startled me. It’s fine.”
Sam looked cautious but stepped into the elevator. “Also, call me Ulysses.”
“Really?” Sam pressed the button for the ground floor automatically, even though Ulysses had already pressed it. “Call me Sam.”
The elevator doors creaked and shuffled closed, giving the sense that they really didn’t want to, and the elevator took off again.
“What brings you to this part of campus?” Ulysses asked. The elevator was getting noticeably cold now, and a very slow breeze stirred Sam’s hair.
“Research.” He glanced at Ulysses. “What about you?”
“Business.” He smiled politely. The sense of tension was getting stronger, and something definitely smelled odd—pungent, like myrrh rather than old paper. Frost started to form on the inside of the elevator doors. “Did you, uh, get a new cologne or something?” His heart beat faster, adrenaline hitting his bloodstream as his body realized something was happening and objected.
“No,” Sam said. “That’s not—I don’t really like scented—”
Every hair stood up on Ulysses’s arms. The elevator jolted to a stop.
Sam looked around, clutching his briefcase. “This is—” The light went out and he made an involuntary little squeak. Ulysses’s eyes went wide; this guy, who was apparently an incredibly powerful magician, was afraid of the dark? He reached into his pocket and fished out a Zippo.
“Hey,” he said, “it’s gonna be all right.” He flipped the wheel.
As the light flared, they saw words scraped into the frost on the inside of the elevator doors: DIONYSUS IS MINE.
Sam actually shouted then. He stumbled backward into Ulysses, knocking them both against the wall of the elevator. The Zippo dropped to the floor and went out. For a moment, Ulysses was pressed against the wall by Sam’s rangy form. Lacking a better idea, he put his hands on the man, one on his upper arm, the other grazing his side and hip. “Hey,” he murmured quietly. “It’s okay.”
The lights came back on as abruptly as they’d gone off. There was no frost, no message. Sam looked up at the ceiling, then back at Ulysses, wide-eyed. “You saw that, right?”
“Yeah, I saw it.” The elevator ground back into life, and Ulysses carefully steered Sam forward a few steps so he could bend over and pick up his lighter. He returned it to his pocket and found there a small bag of lemon drops.
“Here,” he said, offering one to Sam. “It’ll help with the shock.”
“Shock?” Sam took the candy and stared at it.
Ulysses nodded, popping his own piece of candy into his mouth. “Helps the nervous system get itself back in order.”
“Sure.” The other man finally ate his candy. The elevator stopped again, and the doors opened. Sam grabbed his briefcase and all but leaped out, Ulysses following at a more sedate pace.
Outside the building, Sam leaned against the building’s pale sandstone façade. “So you’ve done this before?” he asked Ulysses. “You know about this kind of thing?”
That phrase covered a lot of ground. “I know about a lot of things,” Ulysses said. He stuck his hands in his pockets. “Look, ah . . . I’m sorry about that. Come to dinner with me. I’ll explain.”
Sam blushed. Then he looked down at his watch. “I can’t. I have to get back to my apartment and change for the play tonight.”
“You’re in a play?”
Sam gave a delightful little half smile. “I’m the stage manager. My friends wrote the show; I’m just helping out.” He looked away. “You could come, if you wanted. It’s at James Madison Park. There’s a suggested donation, but you don’t have to—”
Ulysses raised an eyebrow. “What’s it called?”
The other man hesitated. “It’s called My Kingdom for a Horse. It’s all of Shakespeare’s War of the Roses plays done back-to-back as a musical comedy. Meaning Richard II, Henry IV parts one and two, Henry V, all three parts of Henry VI, and Richard III. They left out King John and Henry VIII for obvious reasons, but a few people have complained.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.” Sam made an uncertain face. “It’s short.”
“It doesn’t sound short, but all right,” Ulysses said. He gestured to his motorcycle, which he had left parked inconsiderately next to the bike rack.
“Can I give you a lift?”
Sam looked wide-eyed at the motorcycle for a long moment, then back at Ulysses. “Of course that’s yours,” he muttered.
“Is that a yes?” Ulysses asked, starting to laugh.
“I biked to campus. I’d have to get the bus tomorrow. Or walk.” Sam looked genuinely torn, which made Ulysses laugh harder.
Ulysses finally took a deep breath and added, “I promise not to go too fast.”
“Oh, go to hell,” Sam said. “All right, fine.”
Author Bio
E. H. Lupton (she/they) lives in Madison, WI with her husband and children. Her poems have been published in a number of journals, including Asimov’s Science Fiction, Paranoid Tree, and House of Zolo’s Journal of Speculative Literature. She is also one half of the duo behind the hit podcast Ask a Medievalist. In her free time, she enjoys running long distances and painting.
| Author Website | http://ehlupton.com |
| Author Mastodon | https://romancelandia.club/@pretensesoup |