New books available at Amazon.com

Thank you to readers who bought books.

These are novel-length stories, full of suspense and grit. 

Please send me message on NSX3400@gmail.com for story requests and comments on new novels.

Title: Embers and Blood: Origins of the Sisterhood

Author: Joe Gonzo

Excerpt:

"Please," Trygve whimpered, his voice high and thin. "Not my stones." His hands clawed desperately toward his groin, but Solveig's weight pinned his arms. The left one resisted at first, surprisingly resilient despite its vulnerable appearance. Sigrun bore down harder, her jaw clenched with effort. Then—a subtle shift beneath her fingers, a faint pop like a knuckle cracking. The rubbery orb began to change shape, flattening on one side. Trygve's scream pitched into a piglet's squeal as his left scrotum swelled purple-black. 

Around them, the younger girls gathered, wide-eyed. Asta, the youngest of the daughters, watched the hulking warrior reduced to sobbing ruin, his manhood now exposed in its vulnerability. 

"Once I feared that thing," she whispered to her sisters, nodding toward his groin. "Like a weapon he'd wield against us." 

Despite the agony, his cock twitched, stiffening against his thigh—the poison's cruel work. Ingrid's laugh was sharp as flint. "Look how it betrays him still," she hissed, "rising while he falls." Brynhild leaned closer, her eyes glittering. "The shaft may stand," she murmured, "but the stones—" she gestured to the purpling sack in Sigrun's merciless grip, "—that's where their power hides. Crush them, and what remains?" The three exchanged glances, a current of dark understanding passing between them—the intoxication of reversing, at last, the order of their world. Now, when she looked into Trygve’s face, she saw not the wolf but the dying lamb—his lips flecked with vomit, his eyelids fluttering, tears and mucus pooling in the hollows of his cheeks. He tried to say “stop,” but all that came was a high, keening whine. Sigrun leaned in, her lips inches from his ear.

Title: The Arashari

Author: Joe Gonzo

Excerpt:

Wojciech's hand was a claw, knuckles blanched as if throttling the edge of the stone bench. His breath came in short, liquid hisses. He had not moved in what felt like hours, his gaze pinned to the arena below as if he could will the men’s bodies back into wholeness through sheer disbelief. Around him, the stands seethed and hummed, every woman a node in the living circuit of communal exultation. If not for the reek—hot blood, charred sweat, the faint musk of fermented adrenaline—he might have convinced himself that none of this was real.

It was Tomáš who first broke the spell. His iPhone, held at chest level, had filmed every flick of the obsidian blade, every parabolic arc of arterial spray. The screen still glowed in his lap, flecked now with a single spot of blood—his own, from where he’d bitten through his lower lip. He thumbed the “stop recording” button, then looked up at Wojciech, jaw trembling. “Did you see—” he began, and then his voice stuttered off. Words, for once, had nothing left to offer.

Beside them, Matej frantically scribbled diagrams in a field journal, hands slick with sweat. His pencil skidded across the paper, rendering not the clean lines of a scientific observation, but the involute, fractal spirals of a mind losing its center of gravity. The words on the page—testes, epididymis, ligature, trauma—were repeated in a looping, recursive script. “This is not possible,” he muttered. “Not. Possible.” But he kept writing, as if the act could insulate him from the horror below.

Lukáš’s response was more elemental: he simply vomited onto the sand between the benches, the thin acid splashing across his hiking boots. No one in the crowd acknowledged this. The spectacle below had set the metric for dignity and embarrassment so high that a little regurgitation barely even registered.

For a time, the four men sat immobilized. Down in the arena, the victorious women dragged the two ruined males into the shade, their bodies leaving furrows in the sand, a slow drag line of shame and blood. The crowd began to disperse, mothers pulling curious children up by the hand, young women already rehearsing the next day’s retelling in sharp, delighted whispers. The only ones who stayed were the officials in ash-grey linen, who moved with bureaucratic efficiency, sweeping the arena floor and hosing down the splattered stone with a mix of water and some pungent herbal solution.