Bøger af David Payne

When the troll army landed on the shores of Se Molde it was more than inevitable that there would be a conflict with the humans infesting the place. It was preordained. Rock, the troll boss, knew this because the troll gods had told him when they activated him. His folk didn't know. For them it was an exciting new adventure, now that they had shaken off the Way of Troll with its brutish imperatives.The human world wasn't prepared for this visitation. It offered too many problems for the political machinations of the Xandrian City States. It just simply got in the way of living the human way with its destruction of natural resources and the overpopulation and the blatant lack of regard for any other creatures inhabiting the globe in space where they found themselves. It got in the way of politics. It challenged the human order of things as set out in the Social Contract. Of course, something had to be done and once again, this was where Seagrum the Dwarf came in. He was despatched with a polyglot army of humans and all those other creatures subject to the Social Contract to sort it. He was a dwarf. Things tended to get done. This time though it isn't skill but pure luck and happenchance that save him, and the humans, hides. Of course, there is collateral damage.

Seagrum is a dwarf who gets things done. When the Magister of the Hue and Cry recruits him to solve a little problem that he has with vampires, it seems pretty obvious that he is going to get it sorted. The only question that there should be is how long he will take to do it and how long would it take Florencetown to get back to normal. That is how the thing should have gone but it did not. Perhaps it was the fault of the dwarf's irascible temper or his infatuation with a beautiful former witch who has been drawn into the vampires' scheme. It could be the interference of the Magister's tame and invariably hungry werewolves who are opportunistic feeders, perpetually looking out for a free lunch. Maybe it is the simple fact that the Magister has his own issues in the form of a beautiful woman with a penchant for stilettos, leather and a whip who seems to appear whenever he rings a curious little bell that sits unobtrusively on his desk. Of course, the fact that no one actually understands exactly what a vampire's death pledge is doesn't really help. Although we might refer to them as mortgages, no human ever takes more than one death pledge in the world of Seagrum the Dwarf: it just isn't possible given that humans only have one life (and death). Vampires, naturally enough and despite the many edicts of the Hue and Cry, simply don't tell: preferring to keep their dealings shrouded in mystery. Then there is the matter of payment. Seagrum is extortionately expensive: more than the Hue and Cry can afford in fact. That is where Jonas the Strangler comes in.

Chandler Queenan awakens from a coma caused by a car accident to find that months have passed and nothing is like it was. He is heartbroken to learn his father and brother were killed in the same accident. Inexplicably he has also woken up with psychic abilities. He is astounded upon discovering he can touch people and actually perceive information about them. A shy teenager and afraid of what people may think of him, Chandler must quietly contend with his unsettling powers. One day in showing concern for a school classmate, he warns her in advance of a potentially dangerous situation. In heeding his warning, the girl is spared likely harm. The girl and her family are grateful to Chandler. However when town residents find out about his ability many are not pleased. Despite the small town's unease about Chandler and his powers, he uses these special abilities to aid local police solve a missing person's case. Chandler merely does what he believes is the right thing, however residents do not understand his powers and are mistrustful.

The Collector of Tales is set in a medieval style world where manners are crude and life can be nasty, brutish and short. In this world, The Collector of Tales, is making a journey and like most journeys it is made up of a series of binary choices. It is not a quest that he pursues, indeed he is simply out there to earn the money to keep his family fed and housed and yet it has all the infinite variations of possibility that buffet him and seek to drive him from his chosen paths. It is unsurprising therefore that the tale starts, like Dante's Inferno, with a choice of two paths in a dark wood. The Collector of Tales is written as a series of consecutive stories that offer a montage of the activities of the various inhabitants that The Collector of Tales comes into contact with as he traverses the cold landscape of this world. The style is a mixture of literary fiction interspersed with dark, almost slapstick comedy. It is also at once a kind of fantasy whilst at the same time offering an allegorical picture of our world, more in the manner of Swift's Gulliver's Travels. If you are looking for a novel that offers a slightly different view on fantasy whilst at the same time making direct comparison with the idiosyncrasies of our own frame of existence, then perhaps The Collector of Tales could be a novel that you might find interesting. Although The Collector of Tales stands alone as a novel, it is in fact the first in a trilogy that follows him through to his untimely death. In this first tale, we witness the Collector's peregrinations through a surreal landscape in his search for a little understanding about the place he occupies in space. During this process he is stripped down both literally and figuratively, to the simple man that he is.

The Collector of Tales is about a man in a crisis of age, the choices that he makes and the infinite variations of possibility that buffet him and seek to drive him from his chosen path through life. It is set in a medieval style world where manners are crude and life is nasty, brutish and short. It is written as a series of consecutive tales, following a series of events from idea into reality. This is a curious story of self-discovery in a world dictated by random events. It is a dark comedy set in a medieval world where books are rare and the currency of learning is the spoken word. The landscape is cold and unforgiving. The people are crude. Life here is nasty brutish and short. It is here that we find The Collector of Tales as he struggles to find some meaning in his life. We first meet our itinerant story teller on the road in search of new material for his trade. He is standing at a bifurcation in the way: one path straight and narrow and leading away from humanity, the other long and winding that leads him towards the company of his fellow creatures. He makes what is, of course, another in a life of binary decisions and in this case heads towards humanity and as the road unfolds beneath him so does his tale and the tales of those people that he meets. After a few enlightening nights in what The Collector takes to be an inn ( although it's sign could had read as 'brothel' and its pronunciation could have sounded as 'stable') he moves on to travel further north into the snow and ice with a travelling spice trader whose only word in the common tongue appears to be 'Welcome'. They converse however in the lingua franca of the age until they reach The Collectors destination, the northern town of Trellsheim, where they part: the trader ( apparently) to be murdered brutally in a marketplace and the collector to continue his search for a particular story. In trellsheim, the influence of randomness steps up a pace and The Collector finds himself moving in and out of a number of events that appear to have little significance to him and yet somehow manage to conspire against his apparent purpose in being there. These events culminate in him being abandoned on a frozen road heading further north, sick and unconscious, after a night that possibly (because he cannot remember) involved sex with a young woman that he found washing in the bath in his rented room. In another binary act of good fortune, The Collector is rescued by a traveller family as they head towards a festival somewhere north of the town. This act of random kindness holds a suggestion of something more sinister that grows in his delirious mind until by chance he happens to mention where he is from and becomes adopted by the family as a distant relative (by geographic association, it would seem). This enables him to participate in the strange celebrations of these folk as they enact what he believes to be no more than a myth that he was told of at the start of his journey. In participating, he is stripped down, both literally and figuratively, to the simple man that he is and given the opportunity to glean a little understanding about...

This a story about a boy and his brother and the complexities of growing up when language and learning don't come naturally. Tom has strange dreams that creep up on him when he doesn't expect them. And these dreams don't just happen when he goes to sleep: they can happen any time. Sometimes he uses them to help him deal with problems but other times he has no control at all. When he finds himself in a different world inhabited by creatures of legend he is forced to take stock.In this world the dead row longships; demons can be seen walking in the daylight; there are sorcerers, part human part reptile; and here there be dragons. Tom's dreams are not just experienced by him. His brother Sam has them too and so do his parents. They are also watched by the Titan, Prometheus, as he searches for a way to escape the punishment that the Gods have unleashed on him. Bound to a rock, he seeks relief from his daily torment in dreams and it is in those dreams that he sees the young boy as he moves between his own world and that of myth. Whilst Prometheus in his own world is handsome and majestic, in Tom's world of dreams he is The Watchers, a hideous and monstrous creature, blackened and scarred by fire. There he is a thing of horror and so to Tom it is a serious concern that this creature seems to be trying to break through into his real life. But Tom is not alone. His younger brother Sam also moves in and out of this mythical world and his powers as a Sibilant (part wizard and part reptile) provide Tom with help at need. An even greater surprise is that his parents can see into this world and his father appears in dragon form whilst his mother is a sorceress. Is that enough to overcome the power of one of the ancient gods?

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK Set on North Carolina's windswept Outer Banks, Ruin Creek tells the story of the Madden family. May and Jimmy's reckless, incandescent teenage love has given way, a decade further on, to their son Joey's brokenhearted witness to the dissolution of their marriage and of a family bond he held stronger than time or death. Turning to his grandfather, Pa Tilley, Joey spends long summer days learning to fish the treacherous waters of Oregon Inlet, where North Carolina's mighty Albemarle outrushes into the Atlantic Ocean. One fateful afternoon, a moment's inattention at the boat ramp finds Joey surfacing fifteen yards astern, watching the shoreline recede as the current seizes in, his own name and the boom of the rollers the last thing he hears before the water fills his ears...

Joey Madden, the eleven-year-old narrator of Ruin Creek, is Joe now, a twenty-eight-year-old, Duke-trained anthropologist back on the Outer Banks doing ethnographic fieldwork in Little Roanoke, a traditional fishing community under stress from modernization. Attending services at Little Roanoke's evangelical church, Joe secures a berth aboard a commercial trawl boat called the Father's Price. Between trips to sea, Joe crosses paths with Day Shaughnessey, MD, an OB/GYN whose provision of birth and abortion services to local island women has put her in the crosshairs of the conservative community Joe has come to study. In the same family summer house where Joe once lived the painful end of his parents' marriage, his relationship with Day now begins. As they converge romantically, however, Joe and Day increasingly diverge on politics. If those who can't remember the past are condemned to repeat it, it's Joe and Day's fate-and Joe's, in particular-- to learn that those who can't forget the past are oftentimes condemned to repeat it, too.

Adam Jenrette, thirty-one and a successful Manhattan artist, has been hiding from his past for too long. When a relative's death calls him back to North Carolina, he is pulled into an intense encounter with his own eighteen-year-old self and the two most important people in his life-- Cary Kinlaw, his best boyhood friend, and Jane McCrae, the girl they both, disastrously, loved. And as he relives one incredible, heartbreaking summer from thirteen years before, he dares to recover what he changed his life to lose...A Southern novel in the grand tradition, Early from the Dance is a spellbinding story, beautifully told, about characters who fix themselves indeliably in our memory and the kind of passion that transforms lives.

Brings together the relevant aids to exegesis - linguistic, textual, archaeological, historical, literary, and theological. This title helps the reader understand the meaning of the books of the Old and New Testaments.