Queen of Shadows

'Queen of Shadows' is about a group of mercenaries who decamp from England and venture into rebellious Scotland. They embark on a perilous mission to identify, infiltrate, subvert and destroy any anti-English factions they find in the northern parts of the UK.

It's a parallel universe sort of tale, hardly naturalistic fiction in the mode of a Dreiser or even a Le Carre. I follow more after John Buchan's style of fiction, I mean, with Buchan you don't have a long build-up of monotonous details which eventually unfold before the reader's eyes into a great artistic masterpiece. Plus Buchan is pretty well-mannered and genteel, respectable and clean-cut.

Obviously fans of porn and erotica will be bored with my brand of fiction. So if you are looking for hot steamy pornographic action then this book is nothing you'd be interested in. I suppose this book is too Victorian for the young adult market as well. The schools and the culture in general have really gone full heathen. Certainly the public school libraries here in the USA have lots of books full of explicit sex for 12-year-olds to read. Say, for instance, your daughter has fallen in love with some boy. And if she is sort of ugly, or perhaps somewhat hot and not at all ugly, well, she will want to make sure that a super hot girl at school doesn't come along and steal her boyfriend away from her. So she can go to the school library. And there she can study up on all sorts of sexual techniques to keep her man satisfied. Unlike in former decades, she doesn't have to leave the suburbs and go to an adult book store in some sleazy crime-ridden part of the inner city to learn how to use her body to get what she wants. The heathen public schools can supply kids with heathen books and heathen manuals. But a heathen girl of today also needs role models who will be patient with her, who will really take the time to show her the ways that she can use her body to get what she wants.

What do you think, too much sarcasm or not enough?