Celina Summers’s New Fantasy Series Breaking New Ground
Award-winning author Celina Summers begins a new journey with the release of Theater of Seduction, the first book of her Harlequinade series. The novel was released Thursday to accolades from NYT/USA Today bestselling authors and reviewers alike. Summers is self-publishing the series and will release a new novel every month for ten months. Theater of Seduction is a mash-up of multiple genres: a paranormal romance/time travel/historical fantasy that begins in the world of contemporary American theater digresses through Versailles during the reign of Louis XV and ends up in a full-blown fantasy world with immortals at war.
“Editors loved the story, but publishers didn’t know where to shelve the book so they’d reject it. Eventually, I figured I’d have to publish it myself,” Summers said. As a former editorial director, Summers knew how much work it would take to self-publish the series. So she hired editors and designers she’d worked with before.
“I wanted to make sure there was no lessening of quality for these books,” Summers said. “One of the things I knew I could do through self-publishing that wouldn’t happen with a publishing house was to get each subsequent book into readers’ hands within a month. There are too many readers out there patiently waiting for a sequel that’s one, two, five years overdue. I didn’t want that to happen with this story.”
Whether it’s the intense atmosphere of a professional theater company, the richness of eighteenth-century France, or the magic of an expansive fantasy universe, the connecting threads weave a story unlike anything else out there. One reviewer described it as “Phantom of the Opera meets Outlander meets Something Wicked This Way Comes.”
Summers shrugged off the comparisons.
“I just want to tell stories that are different. I set challenges for myself, like finding ways to make a Harlequin into a bad guy, or turning a traditional villain into a romantic hero. The journey my main character takes is the story, but I love making that journey as herculean as possible.”
Ten full-length novels in ten months is certainly a herculean task, and the Harlequinade is set to do exactly that from February until November 2018. You can learn more about Theater of Seduction at Summers’ website (cachevault.org), including the first two chapters of the novel. Theater of Seduction is available at all online book retailers.
