John Sickels

Hello, I'm John Sickels. I have just finished my first novel, "The Violet Carnival", which can best be described as "H.P. Lovecraft meets Ken Burns."

This book is the first in a trilogy blending occult horror, adventure, and historical fiction. The second book in the series, "The Cardinal Shards," and the third book, "The Serapis Gate" are in the works, as well as two short stories/novellas set in the same universe. My current plan is to bundle "Hangar Queen" and "I Stare out the Window and Wait for Spring" into one package and have that out early this summer.

Some thoughts on the Violet Carnival Universe:

It is a parallel universe to our own. The basic history is very similar to our universe but in the VCU "magic" is real and portions of H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos are real, notably the Lovecraftian entity Nyarlathotep.

The Lovecraft story "The Haunter of the Dark" is a canon event in the VCU, as are parts of "The Shadow over Innsmouth" and "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward." Other Lovecraft stories may or may not have happened in the VCU; that will be decided on a case by case basis. I will say that Cthulhu himself does NOT exist in the VCU.

In the VCU, H.P. Lovecraft was not a famous writer. Instead he became an astronomer and we'll be mentioning one of his discoveries in later stories. Instead of Lovecraft, in the VCU there was a famous horror writer in the 1920s named R.R. Quinlan who wrote Lovecraftian-type stories and fulfilled our Lovecraft's function in the VCU.