Duncan Cook

The elder Magus of the Thelemic Temple of Horus is on his deathbed when his biological son fraudulently inherits The Temple. Jack Mason - a promising young sex magickian and rightful heir to the Temple - plots revenge and falls into a delirious maze of underworld encounters with professional psychopaths, desert brujas, and a twist of fate he never saw coming. Or did he? Meanwhile, Jack assigns his two hot-headed apprentices the ego-corrosive ritual of going into business as clowns in this harrowing, hilarious collision between the contrary occult worlds of urban and rural sorcery.

The routines of four roomates and their landlord are unexpectedly interrupted by the news of an alleged bioterrorist attack in their city. Ona, a webcast diva with her own show, thinks the feds are staging this attack to shift into a fullblown police state. Her roomies think she's paranoid. During a 48-hour citywide bio-hazard lockdown, they are all forced to come to their own conclusions about what is happening during their current state of escalating uncertainty.

Alice, a college Professor of Comparative Religious Studies, meets an enigmatic older woman who roams the campus, sleeps under a bridge, and rattles her with disturbing insights that forever alters the course of her existence.