Les Cités intérieures (Cities Inside)
1. L'Ange écarlate (The Scarlet Angel)
 Illustration : Jacques Lamontagne |
Everything begins during a fetish party, when the Scarlet Angel, a dominatrix, scratches Jimmy Novak's chest with her steel claws. Afterwards, the young painter literally has that woman under his skin. It has odd effects on his art, but also on his body. He no longer sleeps or eats, drinks his own blood and is haunted by visions of an unknown City, as well as by the word Kaguesna. Meanwhile, the Scarlet Angel doesn't understand what is happening, either. Why is she so attracted to that painter ? Why does she get so worked up about the mere proximity of the young man's self-portrait, bought by her friend Boris ? But Jimmy and the Angel are perhaps only one piece in a fantastic story that began three centuries earlier, in London. This is what Ian Beluterre tries to unravel when he comes back from the U.K. to roam Montreal, looking for the Scarlet Angel. |
| Natasha
Beaulieu L'Ange écarlate (The Scarlet Angel) 304 pages, $13.95 |
2. L'Eau noire (The Black
Water)
 Illustration : Guy England |
First there is Randy, a barman in the City of Penlocke, who meets Stick, a bewitching creature who can travel to other places through the Black Water. And there is Mercury Chesterfield, a Montreal fashion designer who, despite her apparent youth, is eighty-four years old. Then there is François Moreau, a young jobless man who wonders if his only talent is the ability to meet odd people and get himself in impossible situations. And his father, Jacques, a Montreal police detective, who is worried about his son, even more because he's found a non-human female body in Lafontaine Park. Last but not least, there is David Fox, an Englishman who, for three centuries, has been living with a City in his head, a City which, to his utmost despair, is being invaded by people coming from he doesn't know where. L'Eau noire (The Black Water), a fascinating journey into the sensual and disturbing universe of Natasha Beaulieu, first revealed in The Scarlet Angel. |
| Natasha
Beaulieu L'Eau noire (The Black Water) 403 pages, $15.95 |
3. L'Ombre pourpre (The
Crimson Shadow)
 Illustration : Guy England |
Aya, daughter of Jimmy Novak and Tura Sherman, has disappeared into the Black Water. Her father, also hurled into the other world, in the City of Penlocke, is trying to find her. But far from the Scarlet Angel whose blood he needs, Jimmy is once again in the grip of the Black Rage. In London, Mercury Chesterfield is working for David Fox, the immortal. She discovers some of the secrets of her origins in the Bo Betcheck, a stunning personal journal covering three centuries. But who wrote this journal and why is its author so interested in her ? While one is looking for his daughter and the other for the one who knows everything about her origins, a disturbing illness is spreading in the inner Cities, an illness much like one prophesized in The Plague City, a mural painted by Novak way back then. Worse yet, on Earth, the waters are rising everywhere, inexplicably, threatening all humanity. L'Ombre Pourpre (The Crimson Shadow), the third book of the Inner Cities, the amazing conclusion of a trilogy unequalled in current fantasy fiction. |
| Natasha
Beaulieu L'Ombre pourpre (The Crimson Shadow) 497 pages, $15.95 |
