Ego Homini Lupus

FOR MATURE READERS ONLY

Joan is wed without a dowry to a knight without a household. In the cold and dark of 12th-century Northumbria she struggles under the burden of life as his servant and wife, mother to his children, keeper of his hall, and tanner of the wolf pelts he must render to the king in tax each summer.  

Alone at the end of the world with her husband and his cruel, mercurial sister-in-law, Joan gradually descends into a netherworld of filth and madness as the demands of her new life crush her mind beneath their weight. 

Cover by Tom Horstmann.

Purchase includes both PDF and .epub versions.

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Gretchen Felker-Martin is an astonishing new voice at the extreme edge of horror.

Her devastating new novel Ego Homini Lupus is a blistering account of one woman's life in 12th century Northumbria, a life so mired in filth and vileness that it would make Bosch and Brueghel shudder. Through her vividly realized characters and extraordinary images, etched in lashes of lacerating prose, the author confronts us with horrors of every description, both natural and supernatural, and invites uncommon empathy for her most grotesque monsters, human and otherwise.

There are no heroes here. No dashing knights, no wise and generous kings. Felker-Martin's narrative centres those who would normally be pushed to the edges: The queer, the weak, the ugly, the deformed and the disabled. No body makes it to the end of life intact. Every skin, and every soul, is marked and scarred, tattered and torn.

Compulsively readable and profoundly unsettling, Ego Homini Lupus is a shattering experience, essential for mature and adventurous horror readers everywhere.

--David Demchuk, award-winning author of The Bone Mother