THE DUKE IN HIS CASTLE by Nebula Award-nominated author and award-winning artist Vera Nazarian is a dark, lush, erotic fantasy novella in the vein of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast, with interior illustrations by the author.

This work is a 2008 Nebula Award Finalist.

Rossian, the young Duke of Violet, wastes away in mad solitude, unable to leave the confines of his decadent castle grounds because of a mysterious invisible barrier... until a strange female intruder arrives at the castle bearing a box of bones.

"Vera Nazarian combines the wry and poignant charm of Hans Christian Andersen with the subversive wallop of Angela Carter in crafting this gem of a fairy tale. No longer merely a promising writer, Nazarian has arrived."

-Paul Witcover

"Vera Nazarian is a writer seemingly so full of story that it just comes bubbling uncontrollably out of her... The Duke in his Castle shows her at the peak of her form in a deceptively simple tale that probes the nature of life and death, of power and succumbing, and ultimately of good and both the evils-active evil and the evil born from apathy."

-John Grant, Co-Editor of THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FANTASY