"The Platinum Raven and other novellas" by Rohan Quine is a paperback comprising a collection of four novellas - "The Platinum Raven", "The Host in the Attic", "Apricot Eyes" and "Hallucination in Hong Kong" - each novella being also available by itself as an ebook. A Distinguished Favorite in the NYC Big Book Award 2021, these four novellas are literary fiction with a touch of magical realism and a dusting of horror, celebrating the darkest and brightest possibilities of human imagination, personality and language.
"The Platinum Raven" by Rohan Quine is a triple convulsion whereby our heroine Raven escalates herself into the Chocolate Raven and then the Platinum Raven, from London to Dubai to the tower in the hills in the desert - then back down again, forever changed. The daydreams of the downtrodden Raven propel her into a fantasy life as a more glamorous version of herself: a party girl living in the world's tallest building, the Burj Khalifa. This latter's imagination then spawns a yet more empowered and intense version of herself, as empress of a sequence of events whose fusion of extraordinary beauty, violence and sensuality is bewitching... A Distinguished Favorite in the NYC Big Book Award 2021.
"The Host in the Attic" by Rohan Quine is a hologram of Oscar Wilde's "The Picture of Dorian Gray", digitised and reframed in cinematic style, set in London's Docklands in a few years' time. High-flyer Jaymi discovers a secret novel online called "The Imagination Thief", written by a woman named Alaia; and they meet and fall in love. In his attic he hides the prototype of a new worldwide Web-browsing hologram, for whose appearance he was the model. While this hologram deteriorates into ever more terrifying corruption, Jaymi's appearance remains forever sweet and youthful, despite his escalating evil ... until the inevitable reckoning unfolds. A Distinguished Favorite in the NYC Big Book Award 2021.
In "Apricot Eyes" by Rohan Quine, a cat-and-mouse pursuit through the New York City night involves a preacher, a psychic and a dominatrix, broadcast live on air - until a horror is unearthed, bringing two of them together and the third to a sticky end. Beneath a waterfront waste ground in the Bronx, a monstrous population is being fattened up, by the preacher, for malign purposes. Jaymi and Scorpio are on his tracks, however, in a blast of fun that trumpets boldness, tolerance and voltage, celebrating the mystery and dangers furled just behind the surface of the everyday. A Distinguished Favorite in the NYC Big Book Award 2021.
In "Hallucination in Hong Kong" by Rohan Quine, sliding from joy to nightmare and back, a plane-flight frames a journey into Jaymi's and Angel's polarised identities and perceptions, where past and present merge in an obsessive fantasy of love, death, horror and apocalyptic beauty. At take-off, warmed by the presence of his friend Angel beside him, Jaymi starts to doze, and enters a fog of horror in seeming to remember that their destination lies in their past, not ahead ... forcing him to explore those hellish possible events lying beneath the surface of our present and future, always ready to break through into reality. A Distinguished Favorite in the NYC Big Book Award 2021.
Keywords: Burj Khalifa, Dubai, Hong Kong, London, New York, Oscar Wilde, contemporary, dark fantasy, gay, horror, imagination, literary fiction, magical realism, transgender.
About the Author: Rohan's novel "The Imagination Thief" was published by EC1 Digital and the Firsty Group in 2013, as an ebook that includes film and audio and photographic content in conjunction with the novel's text. It was then published by EC1 Digital as a paperback in 2014. See http: //www.rohanquine.com/press-media/the-imagination-thief-reviews-media/ for interviews and some nice reviews in "The Guardian" and elsewhere. Four novellas by Rohan, entitled "The Platinum Raven," "The Host in the Attic," "Apricot Eyes" and "Hallucination in Hong Kong," were published by EC1 Digital in 2014, as four separate ebooks and also collected into one paperback entitled "The Platinum Raven and other novellas." See http: //www.rohanquine.com/press-media/the-novellas-reviews-media/ for reviews and interviews relating to these novellas. All five are literary fiction, with elements of magical realism and a dusting of horror. Rohan grew up in South London, spent a couple of years in L.A. and then a decade in New York, where he ran around excitably, saying a few well-chosen words in a handful of feature films and TV shows (see http: //www.rohanquine.com/those-new-york-nineties/), modelling in a few places and drinking deep in many more places. He's now living back in East London, as an Imagination Thief. He aims to push imagination and language towards their extremes, in order to explore and illuminate the beauty, horror and mirth of this predicament called life, where we seem to have been dropped without sufficient consultation ahead of time.
