Author GuestPost with Luki Belle: The Sexy Seven Supernaturals

Seven haunting tales of women, young female adults, and an adolescent girl whose lives change irreversibly because of entities who come into the lives of these female protagonists, mysteriously, invited by yearnings and distresses that exist in these women and girls.

Welcome to one of the November 20th stops on the blog tour for Shadows in Sussex by Luki Belle with Goddess Fish Promotions. Be sure to follow the rest of the tour for spotlights, reviews, more guest posts, and a giveaway! More on that at the end of this post.

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Author Guest Post

A comparison and contrast of the characteristics and circumstances of the two young adult females and one adolescent girl from three of the stories, Anika the teenager in The Aunt, Sabrina the young adult in Ravenous and Elsa the young adult in The Picture Ghost.

Anika is parentless, raised from birth by her uncle Zyfaren who is a strict Commander of the nation’s army and second in command to the Empress. Anika lives a privileged, wealthy yet isolated life with only her governess and the mansion’s staff as her only companions. Her uncle is hyper protective of his beautiful and talented dancer niece, refusing to marry her off to anyone because of the circumstances of Anika’s mother’s pregnancy from an unknown man. The teenager is, however, not fragile and turns out to be just like her uncle in boldness and deviousness but unlike her uncle she ultimately betrays someone unpatriotically which leads to her unexpected fate. Also, unlike her uncle Anika longs for adventure and the opportunity to explore beyond the walls of her confined living. This yearning in her invites into Anika’s life a mysterious being whose desire for Anika threatens the teenager’s life and the life of her uncle, Commander Bresnick Zyfaren. The unsuspecting girl falls in love with Chief Warrior Krem Goxzaren, the dashing, austere and ruthless young man whose nation is soon going to take over Anika’s nation and the army of the Empress and Commander Bresnick Zyfaren. The young adolescent innocently though daringly pursues her love interest with severe consequences.

Sabrina is the eldest daughter of a kind-hearted and hardworking coalminer widower who must leave his hometown due to hardship with his children, a five year old boy Benny and a twelve year old girl Melanie. Sabrina cares for her siblings dearly and loves her father very much but the hardship that forced them out of their hometown also leads to the separation of the coalminer from his children. Sabrina and her siblings are left in the care of a doctor and his wife in their home where the young adult is further separated from Benny and Melanie periodically. The separation from her father, brother and sister creates a distress and longing in Sabrina which she tries to overcome when the doctor asks Sabrina to be the caretaker of his wife’s nephew, the blind nine year old boy Javier. The strange, isolated vineyard setting of the doctor’s home with a large flock of noisy ravens across from the house lake gives Sabrina the creeps. She clings to whatever time she is allowed to spend with Benny and Melanie while trying her best to be a good caregiver to Javier. An aching pang forms in Sabrina’s heart to see her father again and to claim her siblings for herself while she continues to despise the ravens which frequently fly over the doctor’s property. A young man who works on the vineyard of the doctor tells Sabrina a tale about the ravens when he gives her the hope of possibly reconnecting with her father. Thus sets the stage for the ultimate fate of Sabrina from the yearning and distress inside her. A reader is left to wonder if she had not pursued her desire to see her father, if she had poured her love into Javier without longing for her siblings, and if she did not despise the ravens so much could she have avoided her fate.

Elsa, a gifted poet and the only daughter of another kind-hearted and hardworking widower, a farmer, is encouraged to seek higher education in a far away university town where she manages to get a scholarship through her poetic talents. A rurally raised girl, accustomed to a close-knit community of farmers and their children, is suddenly exposed to a very different life in the fast-paced university campus life where she struggles to socialize and to be assertive to get help from classmates and professors. Elsa finds her freshman first semester coursework challenging and her poor grades nearly cost her the scholarship. She longs to return home to her father at the end of the semester but her ambition and the news of a bad farm year from her father compels the young adult to find the means to prepare for the next semester during the semester break. Elsa makes the uncomfortable decision to stay back in the university when most undergraduate students go home for the holidays. While her father is not happy about his daughter’s decision, he too needs to travel away from their hometown to find other means of income to make ends meet since the farm yield was bad that year. Elsa knows that money is scarce from her father’s situation, so she steps out of her comfort zone and finds two parttime jobs on campus during the semester break to help pay for her living expenses while she prepares for the next semester’s coursework, to save her scholarship. During this time, her longing for a fatherlike figure in her solitary circumstances in the mostly empty campus, and her talent for poetry connects her to a historic literary figure with whom she becomes eerily obsessed. Thus sets the stage for Elsa’s ultimate fate. A reader is left to wonder where Elsa could have made different choices during the semester break, or had she been bolder during the semester could her fate have been different.

All three females exude tempered boldness and inherent cleverness which they are subconsciously aware of but do not acknowledge soon enough. They are self-aware of their beauty and gifts yet are naïve to exploit their charms because all three have led protective lives under their male parental figures. Sabrina and Elsa had only a short time before their mothers died while Anika did not see her mother at all. The male figures in the lives of these three girls gave them abundant love but all three girls experience abandonment which created their yearnings and distresses. Each one of them invites paranormal and supernatural entities into their lives from this emptiness of separation they feel. Curiosity is another common theme amongst these three girls, this attribute in them draws them closer to their destinies.

In contrast, Anika the teenager is the boldest and most daring of the three and a reader is left to wish that Sabrina and Elsa could have been a little bolder when they had the opportunity so that they could have had different fates. A reader will certainly be able to analyze how Sabrina and Elsa could have been more assertive and less curious. It would be obvious to the reader where Anika could not have been so heavily curious, but her isolation is perhaps the strong compelling force that drove her to be overly inquisitive and daring. Sabrina had a little more freedom than Anika, and had Sabrina used her cleverness a little timelier, she may have managed to make a better situation out of her limited physical freedom. Elsa certainly had the most physical freedom, yet she did not make use of it to avert her fate.

About the Book

The Sexy Seven Supernaturals
Paranormal & Dark Short Stories for Adults
by Luki Belle

Published 25 June 2023
Gatekeeper Press

Genre: Short Stories, Fantasy, Paranormal, Erotica
Page Count: 651
Add it to your Goodreads TBR!

Seven haunting tales of women, young female adults, and an adolescent girl whose lives change irreversibly because of entities who come into the lives of these female protagonists, mysteriously, invited by yearnings and distresses that exist in these women and girls –

1) The Photo and the Letter: Larissa, a heartbroken young woman, finds a captivating photo of an elderly friend and becomes compelled to discover more about the bitterly written letter that was addressed to the elderly woman, who had a fascinating past.

2) Strength of Feathers: Vanessa, an orphan, who struggled her entire life to survive and achieve professional success, decides one night to overcome her fear of heights and her reluctance to be spontaneous when she meets an enigmatic, wealthy woman who has ulterior motives.

3) The Aunt: Anika, a teenage girl, niece of a notable and authoritative commander of her nation’s army, finds herself in a precarious situation when at a bloody crossroads of her nation’s history, she falls for a young, ambitious, and ruthless military man from a long-rival nation, who is about to take over rulership of Anika’s nation and her uncle’s army.

4) Ravenous: Sabrina, a young adult, daughter of a coalminer, is forced to leave her hometown with her father and siblings. Her family is taken in by a kind doctor who has mixed intentions for helping the homeless father and his three children.

5) The Bride’s Matchmaker: Mylakena, a young rural woman, comes to live in a dynamic, metropolitan city with her uncle, when she falls for two handsome, rich, and athletic young city men and realizes that her innocent infatuation has severe consequences.

6) The Picture Ghost: Elsa, a young adult daughter of a farmer, starts attending college far away from her hometown. Her poor grades lead her to a professor whose art collection draws Elsa uncomfortably close to an enigmatic stranger from the past.

7) The Old Willow Tree: Helen, a highly successful businesswoman, retires in a foreign country where, while searching for a permanent home with a garden, she falls in love with a stunning willow tree on a property that she desperately wants to buy.

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Excerpt

1) The Photo and the Letter

“My dear, you have broken my heart in so many pieces that I feel like I live now without one, yet, feeling the pain of it being torn to shreds. It is that pain with which I must now live for the rest of my life. How could you betray me? When I gave my everything to you and loved you like my own flesh and blood! My soul and harmony, I found nectar in your essence and to think that you would do such a cruel deed to me makes me want to tear my flesh so that I strip myself of pain forever, the pain of watching you in bed with my very own brother! I damn you! I damn you for the rest of your life! And I curse my brother for betraying me with you! Know this now my dearest, beloved wife, I will leave you both to your damnation of cheating against me! You will never see me again until the day I will return when I die, to take what belongs to me from you! Frederick”

2) Strength of Feathers

“You also own this place?” Vanessa asked nervously while sitting down across from Eliza instead of beside her as she was asked to do by the lady.

Eliza smiled “Okay let’s get it out of the way once and for all! I own this entire building and everything in it, though not everyone but all the businesses. There! Can we talk plainly now?”

“We could unless there is more to show me about how rich you are!” Vanessa snapped and gulped down the entire champagne putting down the glass with a hint of temper.

“Is there something wrong my dear?” Eliza said while gently touching Vanessa’s hand.

Vanessa exhaled in a frustrated way “Look Lady Eliza…I…I…” the champagne was rushing to her head in her empty stomach “…I am not going to sleep with you okay! I…I…”

But before she could finish Eliza began laughing hysterically in a shrill voice letting her head jerk back from the amusement.

3) The Aunt

As a child Krem had heard rumors about his aunt, through gossip between his mother and her sisters. They talked about Zaylinar having been raised by a sisterhood in the northwestern desert that bordered Xenia and that his aunt was sent away because she was rebellious in nature as a child. She was returned to her family only when she had been sufficiently tamed. It was then that her father, the Head Counsel of the Republic at the time, offered his daughter to the Minister’s son Ruhr. Both fathers had quickly blessed and sealed the engagement. Growing up, Krem had become emotionally attached to stories of his mysterious aunt whom he did not see until he was an adolescent. On the day when Zaylinar came to meet the young boy, the stories became very much alive in the teenager’s mind. The lad felt his very first pangs of love and physical desire for his aunt. Feelings that magnified over time, without subduing. Yet the enigmatic woman shunned her nephew’s affections telling him that he could never be like Ruhr and that the only way she would ever have him would be if he proved himself to her.

About the Author

Luki Belle works in the media industry. Storytelling was a fixture from childhood when she would listen to stories told by her grandparents, parents, sisters, and cousins, who would read to her from diverse cultural fiction books. Scary and ghost stories in particular, captured Luki as a child and led to her fascination with the concept of feeling haunted or being haunted by something or someone, whether desirably or whether uninvited. In the Sexy Seven Supernaturals, Luki explores the amalgamation between the psychological and the paranormal, enabled by the human mind through its power to imagine, visualize, and yearn. The female characters in this book each have strong or subtle conscious desires created or triggered by subconscious or unconscious distresses, leading each of them to unexpected fates.

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Giveaway Alert!

Luki Belle will be awarding a $25 Amazon or Barnes and Noble GC to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour.

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