The Last of the Dire Dwellers: A Fantastical Tale of the Historical Atlantis

The Minoans! A fabled city! A forest full of mythical monsters! A priest is banished! What could possibly go wrong?

Four thousand years ago, the Minoan culture of ancient Crete was the most successful, advanced, elegant civilization the world had ever seen. This droll, darkly erotic novel brings this spectacular time and place to life in all its joy, brutality and moral ambiguity.

It’s narrated in the amiable, citified voice of Ekoto, high priest of the goddess Britomartis, Mistress of Beasts. He’s a harmless sort who wouldn’t stand out in a crowd except for two things: he has hooves instead of feet and his singing voice has very strange properties. His sister, the starchy high priestess Therasia, doesn’t possess these odd attributes.

Ekoto is exiled from the luxuries of the capital city Konoso for a crime he didn’t commit. (The queen doesn’t like him.) Through a series of harrowing circumstances, he falls in with the monstrous, primordial races of the Forest known to the human world as the Dire Dwellers.

His time among these creatures of myth triggers a hormonal cascade that changes him-in slow stages of increasingly disturbing intensity-into something vastly different that what he was before, something with an immense sexual appetite and an alarming capacity for violence. His sister falls in with the Dwellers as well and embarks on an erotic relationship worthy of the steamiest romance novel (much to Ekoto’s dismay). City politics, unknown family connections and past acts of violence lead to a spectacular and savage climax whose outcome is never certain from one moment to the next.

On one level, this is a ripping yarn about an exotic byway of human history rarely explored in historical fantasy. On another, it speaks to humanity’s destruction of the natural environment and its enslavement and annihilation of minority races. And it all comes wrapped in Flood’s cool wit and clear, muscular prose.