The Promise Keeper

By L. Marie Wood

Release: September 1, 2021

A young girl, on the cusp of sexual maturity, in what is now known as Benin, West Africa, is seduced by a beautiful stranger, a man the likes of which she has never seen before.Their encounter changes her forever. She becomes an asiman, a vampire: one of the undead.

The Promise Keeper comes to her, willing her to do his bidding—to keep an unspoken promise. He probes her mind and plants suggestions so she will follow his plan, until she fights back. She runs, her travels taking her to Europe and the Caribbean over centuries to escape him. She finally settles in New York City, convinced that she has eluded him… until she falls in love.

The Promise Keeper is a story of love, despair, murder, and deceit.

 They call it the Death House. For the women awaiting execution at Raskin Correctional, it’s the last place they’ll ever know. This is where Lucky meets Angie, and the two forge a friendship through the walls of their cells. But Angie is no regular inmate. She is an asiman, a vampire-like creature from African folklore, and she’s lived many lives before coming to the Death House. Before she’s executed, Angie begs Lucky to become an asiman herself, return to the world, and protect Angie’s son from the creature that turned her — the Promise Keeper.

 

This is a lush horror story that crosses continents and spans decades, with all the sex and bloodletting of the best vampire tales. But Wood goes deeper, using vampire lore to paint a moving portrait of two women forced to make impossible choices in an unforgiving world where the evil lies in both monster and man. Vampire fans will get their fill here, as will horror readers thirsty for a fresh, unexpected take on one of the genre’s oldest mythologies.

– Library Journal

“L Marie Wood’s novel The Promise Keeper was rst released in April 2018, and it is being re-released by Cedar Grove Publishing in May 2021 with a brand new absolutely killer cover by the immensely talented Lynne Hansen. This re-release news is fantastic as The Promise Keeper is a wonderful novel by an incredibly talented #ownvoices creator. For those who cannot get enough of erotic horror and want more diverse characters, The Promise Keeper is required reading. Readers will nd the story of vampires, sex, history, travels, love, and broken hearts scintillating. Wood, also an award-winning screenwriter, writes vivid, lush scenes that jump o the page. The opening scene is heady and mesmerizing, setting the scene for a vampire transformation that would make even E.L. James and fans of Fifty Shades of Grey blush. We soon learn that there is West African mythology in the mix, of family bonds from years ago that resonate until this day. Fans of Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories to L.A. Banks’s Vampire Huntress series must read The Promise Keeper. It is addictive and compelling, and it will keep you turning the pages to race to the ending. Fans of the television series The Vampire Diaries will also love this book, particularly if they wished more of the erotic elements had been played up. Do yourself a favour and take a bite out of The Promise Keeper before it devours you.”

 – Eva Roslin, Librarian

L Marie Wood’s novel The Promise Keeper was first released in April 2018, and it is being re-released by Cedar Grove Publishing in September 2021 with a brand new absolutely killer cover by the immensely talented Lynne Hansen.

 

This re-release news is fantastic as The Promise Keeper is a wonderful novel by an incredibly talented #ownvoices creator. For those who cannot get enough of erotic horror and want more diverse characters, The Promise Keeper is required reading. Readers will find the story of vampires, sex, history, travels, love, and broken hearts scintillating.

 

Wood, also an award-winning screenwriter, writes vivid, lush scenes that jump off the page. The opening scene is heady and mesmerizing, setting the scene for a vampire transformation that would make even E.L. James and fans of Fifty Shades of Grey blush. We soon learn that there is West African mythology in the mix, of family bonds from years ago that resonate until this day. Fans of Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories to L.A. Banks’s Vampire Huntress series must read The Promise Keeper. It is addictive and compelling, and it will keep you turning the pages to race to the ending. Fans of the television series The Vampire Diaries will also love this book, particularly if they wished more of the erotic elements had been played up. Do yourself a favour and take a bite out of The Promise Keeper before it devours you.

 

Eva Roslin, Librarian

The Realm

L. Marie Wood

Cover Art by Eric Battle

Also Available on Amazon

“In The Realm, L. Marie Wood presents readers with a cast of nuanced characters against the backdrop of an intricate world where nothing is simply black and white or right and wrong. The “sins of the father” takes a refreshing detour from triteness and makes us accomplices to the main character’s (Patrick’s) endeavors.”

– R. J. Joseph, author of Monstrous Domesticities

You thought you were dead.

Waking up and looking all around you, you realize all you learned about The Afterlife was a fantasy. You don’t know where you are, but you do know it’s not a pleasant or suitable place. You need to run. Hard and fast.

Eventually, you meet others doomed to live in this terrifying Realm with you. Here are gathered the newly dead from all over the universe. A formidable race of giant beasts hunts them. The likes of which have never been seen by those in the living world. This place is like nothing you ever learned about in life – neither Heaven nor Hell, neither Purgatory nor Sheol.

You encounter clusters of people huddled together for safety. You’re a lone wolf – they don’t trust you, nor you them. Perhaps with good reason.

Patrick is key to the future of The Realm. He must right old wrongs and fight against all the terrors it has in store. He must fight to save his family and, most importantly, all of his descendants. His revelations will impact the living world, as well as what comes next.

Patrick is the future of humanity.

Can he succeed?

Sycorax’s Daughters

Edited By: Kinitra Brooks, PhD., Linda D. Addison, 
Susana Morris, PhD.
Cover Art by Jim Callahan

A powerful, revealing anthology of dark fiction and poetry by Black women writers. The tales of what scares, threatens and shocks them will enlighten and entertain you.

Sycorax’s Daughters’ stories and poems delve into demons and shape shifters from Carole McDonnell’s “How to Speak to the Bogeyman” and Sheree Renée Thomas’ “Tree of the Forest Seven Bells Turns the World Round Midnight” to far future offerings from Kiini Ibura Salaam’s “The Malady of Need”, Valjeanne Jeffers’ steampunk female detective in “Mona Livelong: Paranormal Detective II” and others.

These thought-provoking twenty-eight stories and fourteen poems cover creatures imagined— vampires, ghosts, and mermaids, as well as the unexpected price paid by women struggling for freedom and validation in the past—slavery to science-fiction futures with transhumans and alternate realities.

Leave the lights on and join these amazing authors as they share their unique vision of fear.

““Shakespeare stole Sycorax’s point of view from the world. Sycorax’s Daughters draws that perspective to the fore, allowing Black women to explain themselves, and the evils they have experienced, to the delight of readers who are ready to hear.”

 

– Book Riot