Gods of Manhattan

“You’re in New York. Protocol went out the window the second you arrived.
This isn’t a protocol kind of town.
This is a town that breeds monsters and heroes, geniuses and madmen.
This town makes gods, and heaven help you, you wanted to be one of us.”

I've just finished editing Gods of Manhattan. I'm rather sad that I've finished, I had so much fun editing it, but hey, I can console myself with the fact that, very soon, our readers will get to enjoy it! It'll be out in shops at the end of July.

Book reviewers, bloggers, friends, (Romans, countrymen) and other editors who're on my personal Twitter and Facebook feeds will know that, while editing, I just Could Not Shut Up about how good this book was. I kept on quoting from particularly brilliant passages, telling people much fun it was, even declaring myself Queen of the Leopard Men at one point, after the fantastically pulpy character, Maya, Queen of Zor-Ek-Narr and girlfriend of the superhero Doc Thunder.

Well, just one blogpost about it, and then I'll find something else to talk about, I promise...

Maya frowned at Doc Thunder, irritated.
“You were flirting with her, weren’t you?”
“I wasn’t flirting, she’s an evil–”
“Oh, please! Like she’s not your type! Chain you to a dungeon wall and you’re anybody’s, I should know. Let me guess – did you tell her that beneath her iridescent beauty her evil shone cold and hard as a diamond?”
“Well, I didn’t say that exactly…”

Gods of Manhattan is set in Jon Green's steampunk universe, an alternative 20th Century where Britannia never did stop ruling the waves, and where Queen Victoria is still kept 'alive' by steam technology: our Pax Britannia line of novels. However, whereas Green's books focus on Ulysses Quicksilver, the most dashing secret agent the British Empire has ever employed, Gods of Manhattan takes us over the pond, to the good ol’ United Socialist States of America (By the way, you certainly don't have to have read the Ulysses Quicksilver novels to enjoy Gods of Manhattan, but they are very good).

NEW YORK, USSA - The steam-powered city of tomorrow where psychedelic beat-poets rumble with punk futurists in the rain-drenched alleys, and where mad science colludes with the monstrous plans of the Meccha-Fuhrer!
NEW YORK, USSA - City of dazzle and danger. Only here could we find The Blood Spider, Doc Thunder and the saint of ghosts known as El Sombra!
NEW YORK, USSA - The setting for a bloody battle of steel will and science gone wild in a contest to save the city of tomorrow - or end it!

If you like superhero comics and secret identities – and you love stories like Watchmen and Astro City that play with the genre – you'll want to read this book.

If you like steampunk and alternate histories, if you want a writer who's really thought about what steampunk and alternate histories actually mean, you'll love it.

If you want a story about heroes wrestling with human and superhuman problems, about what happens when characters' moral codes collide, about being on the right side of the wrong side of the law, you'll love this book.

And if you just want a story about some guys and gals beating up Nazis who really, really deserve it, this is also your book.

Doc Thunder says all true patriots will read this book. And you wouldn't want to make him mad, would you?

[click picture for larger, high-def version]

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