Danni is twenty-six, fed up with dating and defeated by the power she perceives men wield over her. Still, she longs for true and abiding love, and so on the advice of a friend she seeks out the services of Raj, a hypnotist.
Raj weighs Danni’s predicament, then leads her into a spell. As he does, a strange humming accompanies his words. An extraordinary, winged creature—a hornet queen—has joined them, he tells her, and with the queen comes hope.
With the hornet’s help, Raj guides Danni into a series of spells: through unexpected inner landscapes where she faces off with a monster and a troubling incarnation of her teenage self. Gradually, she recognizes that Raj is more integral to her quest than she’d imagined—and the queen more potent—and together they soar toward an astonishing future in an unseen world.
With a flair for the uncanny, The Hornet’s Spell offers an erotic and philosophical imagining of our potential for romantic fulfillment.
Rich Shapero’s novels dare readers with giant metaphors, magnificent obsessions and potent ideas. His casts of idealistic lovers, laboring miners, and rebellious artists all rate ideas as paramount, more important than life itself. They traverse wild landscapes and visionary realms, imagining gods who in turn imagine them. Like the seekers themselves, readers grapple with revealing truths about human potential. The Hornet’s Spell and his previous titles—Hibiscus Mask, Beneath Caaqi’s Wings, Dreams of Delphine, The Slide That Buried Rightful, Dissolve, Island Fruit Remedy, Balcony of Fog, Rin, Tongue and Dorner, Arms from the Sea, The Hope We Seek, Too Far, and Wild Animus—are available in hardcover and as ebooks. They also combine music, visual art, animation and video in the TooFar Media app. Shapero spins provocative stories for the eyes, ears, and imagination.