Cover Reveal: THE DEMETER DIARIES by Marge Simon and Bryan D. Dietrich

Cover reveal (artwork by Wendy Saber Core) of THE DEMETER DIARIES by Marge Simon and Bryan D. Dietrich, coming out in July 2019, kindle and paperback edition.
'The Demeter Diaries' is a record of love and longing and the inevitable horror that arises between the minds of Mina Harker and Vlad Dracula as they court one another in waking dreams. The dialogue, written in both poetry and prose, imagines a psychic connection that develops between the two even before Dracula arrives in England. As Dracula makes his way from Transylvania to Whitby on the doomed ship Demeter, the two would-be lovers transmit their thoughts across the waves and lands that separate them, alternately wooing and terrifying one another with the idea of love eternal and all the dark delicacies necessary to ensure it.

"What a wonderful idea for a poetry collection! Bryan Dietrich and Marge Simon have collaborated on The Demeter Diaries, a conversation in poetry between Mina and Vlad from Bram Stoker's Dracula. Vlad's lines are suitably tight, classical, the use of enjambment tightly locking the lines together and emphasizing Vlad's considered choice of words--after all, he's had a few extra decades to think about them. Mina's lines are long and prose-like, evoking her enthusiastic romanticism with a kind of breathlessness. It's well-suited to her part in this dramatic dialogue, allowing her to show off her lady's education and quote from her reading (in this case segments of the poetry of Keats and Poe). Simon and Dietrich appropriately end the sequence with two poems in parallel, with short lines from each alternating down the page as the lovers call and respond. An impressive collaboration."  
--- Steve Rasnic Tem, Multiple Bram Stoker and International Horror Guild Author

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

MARGE SIMON lives in Ocala FL. She is a retired art teacher with an MA in Fine Arts and a minor in English Lit from the University of Northern Colorado. Her fiction and/or poetry has appeared in Asimov’s, Daily Science Fiction, Bete Noire, New Myths, and Polu Texni. Her works may be found in anthologies such as Tales of the Lake 5, Chiral Mad 4, You, Human and The Beauty of Death. Marge has won the Bram Stoker Award, the Rhysling, Elgin, Dwarf Stars and Strange Horizons Readers’ Awards; she serves on the HWA Board of Trustees, maintains a newsletter column, 'Blood & Spades'. Marge is the second woman to be acknowledged as a Grand Master Poet of the SFPA, and is on the board of the Speculative Literary Foundation. She attends the ICFA annually as a guest. Website 

BRYAN D. DIETRICH is the author of seven books of poems and co-editor of an anthology of superhero poetry. He has published poems in Asimov’s, Weird Tales, Strange Horizons, The New Yorker, The Nation, Poetry, Ploughshares, The Paris Review, and many other journals. He has won the Asimov’s Reader’s Choice Award, The Paris Review Prize, a “Discovery”/The Nation Award, a Writers at Work Fellowship, and has been nominated for both the Pushcart and the Pulitzer. Former President of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Poetry Association, Bryan is Professor of English and Chair of the Division of Arts & Letters at Newman University in Wichita, Kansas. He is currently co-writing a book of science fiction poems with the author Steven Erikson. Website