"Kindling, which is the first book in a set of...well, how many more there'll be is something I have yet to negotiate or even figure out...but, as it stands at the moment there will probably more under the general series title Flame Of Evil. What we have here is an alternative history work in an approximately parallel time to the present, except, in this world, the Crusades never happened and scientific progress was considerably slower, Islam and Christianity never assumed the same dominance, and the Industrial Revolution and the "discovery" of America both got off to a much later start. To cap it all, the highly unpleasant Mosul Empire roared out of Asia Minor some two hundred years earlier, and, in an unholy alliance with the Teutons and Mamalukes, placed all of Norther Africa, and Eastern and Southern Europe under a tyrannical police-state theocracy and were only stopped at the English Channel by the Norse Union of Britain and Scandinavia.

The action of the book takes place in an America where the only European settlements are a string of Kingdoms and Republics along the East Coast, while the rest of the continent is firmly in the hands of the native tribes and confederations. The Mosul under Hassan IX have just invaded from across the ocean, establishing a colonial beachhead in what would be Virginia. The techno level is kinda Victorian steam punk, with trains, airships, and some big nasty automatic artillery, but with an awful lot of Davy Crockett stuff thrown in for good measure. And just for even better measure, the paranormal plays a far greater part than it does in our world, and also allows for a lengthy visit by the inter-dimensional Yancey Slide (currently starring in his own web serial right here on Funtopia), plus guest spots by Johnny Cash, James Dean, Elvis, and JFK, who have very different job descriptions. Thus I can promise you cavalry charges and trench warfare, political satire, epic heroics, and weird shamanism, nasty sex, and nastier religions, public executions, and rip-snorting good fun. (Did someone say "movie"?)