Apricot Brandy

By Lynn Cesar

Karen Fox returns to the family homestead after her father's suicide anddiscovers it has become the locus of a malignant Mayan plant demon. She mustbattle the demon and its adherents with the help of Kyle, an ex-con, andQuetzal, a magic-wielding Guatemalan bruja. Quetzal raises an army of the ghostsof women who have been sacrificed -- but if they cannot win the battle, their souls will be forfeit.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0809572044
• ISBN13: 9780809572045
• Release Date: February 2008
• Publisher: Wildside Press
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.32 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 4.4" x 6.8"
• Age Range: 16 years and up
• Grade Range: Grade 11 and higher

Customer Reviews

Apricot Brandy -- A Winner

Lynn Cesar begins by lulling her readers with sweet bleakness: a roving young woman, orphaned by suicide and maternal tragedy, returns to her rural home in search of closure. Then she makes the mistake of guzzling her abusive dad's magical homemade booze (the book's title), and compounds the blunder by checking her basement for pods (the old fashioned kind, not i). Soon she's flailing in a Mayan hell, where plants and homicidal corpses riot. Imagine corrupt cops conspiring with onyx-eyed Mayan gods and dead fathers... and a witch. Stay far away from the sheriffs, the medical examiner and the ex-cons. Lynn Cesar is a top-drawer spell-caster of rural and Central American horror and hypnoguery. You'll never again pass complacently by a greenhouse or nursery -- to say nothing of measuring radon under your floorboards -- once you've read A.B. I couldn't put it down! By Dan Temianka, author of "The Jack Vance Lexicon"

Words can't describe it, BUY THIS BOOK!

There is a breed of fantasy that rises above and beyond the mundane, that breaks through the often tired repetativeness speckling the bookstore. At times, these brilliantly poignant reeds are lost in the mucky ebb of so many stories. By chance this book was given to me by a friend, and from the moment I opened the first page, I couldnt put it down. Apricot Brandy has a style that is both pure and haunting, it is beautifully written and wrought with inexplicable emotion. Lynn Cesar has earned a high place on my bedstand bookshelf for as long as she keeps writing.

APRICOT BRANDY is an exciting combination horror and dark urban fantasy

Decades have passed since Karen Fox returned to her family's farm; twenty years since she walked out on the man who was supposed to protect her, but instead sexually assaulted her. Now her father is dead having blown away his face with a self inflicted shotgun blast; Karen has come home to make special arrangements for the land and her father's cremation. She is unaware that her father was the High Priest for the Green God Xibalba and his acolytes drop his corpse into a fissure beneath the morgue. Her sire joins his Master and confers power on Acting Assistant Sheriff Carver, who prefers to rule above ground unlike Karen's father whose preference in the underworld. From the moment she stepped onto the farm Karen sensed something was wrong. While looking at her father's body, Karen feels something close around her wrist followed by seeing a dress she wore as a child that was destroyed years ago yet is in pristine perfect condition complete with a still moist blood spot.. Quetzal a Mayan witch who knows that Xibalba is near; she plans to fight the evil God along with the ghosts that will accompany her. However, she also knows she must protect Karen from the malevolent Green God who has plans for the daughter of his loyalist worshipper. APRICOT BRANDY is an exciting combination horror and dark urban fantasy that takes readers to the edge of sanity and leaves then there wondering if this time evil will triumph. Karen may be innocent, but she is the catalyst (thanks to her DNA) that sets things in motion although she is the polar opposite of her cruel father. She reaches inside herself with determination to defy him and his God while the Mayan witch rallies his ghostly horde and the townsfolk. Readers will find Lynn Cesar's work magically entertaining. Harriet Klausner