This stupid fucking book has been eating my soul for fifteen years, in one form or another, and this is the only form of exorcism I can think of. I have cranked out draft after draft after draft, and yet no matter how much it shifts and changes form, bits and pieces of it find their way into new projects and corrupt everything. For your consideration, here are some of the different versions of the story that have worked their way through me over the years. Some of these versions are all the way finished, and some even have sequels! Others are barely a chapter long. Something about a romance story between a naïve but powerful man and an aloof god of Death really tickled me for a long time. Maybe because I was severely depressed. Anyway, here they are, you can have them.

If I see one of you Hollywood producer types using the name "Shalim" (a Canaanite god of Dusk, brother to "Shachar", a Canaanite god of Dawn) as the name of a god of Death, I'll know you stole it from me. Reminder: everything on this blog is Copyright Kenneth J. Perry. I am happy to grant use and adaptation permissions on a case-by-case basis. I also have all of the original files used to produce these PDFs, and many years worth of paper trail, including the original hand-written drafts. Why am I doing this to myself at one A.M.? No one is going to read this anyway.

Content Warning: Homos, some explicit. Also violence, abuse, foul language, dark themes.

(P.S. Nemo Anise is a pen name I briefly considered using.)

This last one is the version of the book that I eventually published (later to withdraw). In order to present it to you here today, I had to convert from .kpf to .epub to .pdf, which was a pain. I hope my suffering somewhat makes up for the book's tangible inadequacies.