Samantha Cain grew up in foster care after the death of her parents. Now she's focused on her job as a police officer... until her life is uprooted by a brutal murder and a clue that points to secrets in her past, and a killer that is something beyond human.

Life for Rose is a game. A deadly game. She lives in the squalor of Subterran Prime: a sprawling underground world where mad gods sleep around the fools who serve them; where the savage Justicars seek out criminals and undesirables for swift justice at the end of their bronze beaks; where hapless slaves are branded with the mark of the cypher and fed to the starving masses or the gluttenous ruling class. In this world Rose has two things: her intersex lover, Jay Chimera, and her imagination. Geared with both, she hurtles through dreamworlds and virtual realities, until she discovers the ultimate gift: a drug, the Haze, that makes her dreams reality. But in order to get the Haze she must put herself in the way of the Justicars and face their terrible thirst for punishment. Can Rose and Jay play the game and reach the next level in their quest for escape, or will they lose everything? This is a self-contained novelette that serves as a taster of my current work-in-progress, the full-length novel Troglodyte Rose. This is loosely adapted from a novella published in 2009 by Cadaverine Publications, which was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. The interactive website that accompanies this story is available at troglodyterose.com. Artwork by Kurt Huggins and Zelda Devon. Interactive website designed by Michael Bryant.

Fifteen year-old Maggie arrives in London on the run from her humdrum suburban life, determined to make it big in show business. For more than thirty years she is exploited by both men and the media. She struggles against endless set-backs and disappointments, always remaining optimistic, always believing that this time her big break has come. Then, when most of us would have given up all hope, the celebrity circus rockets her to bizarre and unexpected pinnacles of fame. Starting in 1970 Maggie de Beer’s journey mirrors the rise of celebrity culture and the growth of the media which ruthlessly created it, exploiting and destroying the lives of girls like Maggie who willingly offered themselves up, happy to make any amount of personal sacrifices in exchange for a chance to live the dream. She is determined to make herself “interesting” and only when she finally achieves her goal, at enormous personal cost, does she finally discover, under the full glare of the media spotlight, that the family she was running away from was never as humdrum as she had believed. This is the story of a woman who just wanted to be recognised and loved by the public. www.MaggiedeBeer.com