Böcker av Amos Keppler

The eyes in the sky have been here for a long time. They are finally revealing themselves to the world.

A group of people is traveling from Dakar in Senegal through Sahara and along the Asian Silk Road in search of ancient truths and in an attempt to solve the mysteries of their existence.

 The dwindling, ragged group of sorcerers and seekers traveling the realms keeps searching for the elusive prize they fear they may never find, keeps passing through portals and walking vast foreign realms. What started out as one thing has become something completely different. Janet knows that feeling well. It is what she feels every time she finds herself in front of a mirror. They have become her. She has become them. They can hardly see past the moment of their possible success. She can only glimpse it as unending mist in the horizon. The blade of their swords has turned sharp, their minds dull. The original purpose remains. They travel on, bound in hatred and desolation, towards the inevitable confrontation awaiting them at some point in a dark and distant future. All of them know this, even in the murkiest part of their hazy awareness. They fight on!  Janet has fallen as far as any being can possibly fall; to the bottom. She has become like a banshee, a specter drifting aimlessly through realms and territories she can not name, an Afterglow of scars and emotions that would kill any ordinary human being. But she survives, survives wounds grave enough to bury several others, survives drowning, stabbings and the darkest sorcery and wounds of the soul. Sometimes she wonders if anything can kill her or truly hurt her anymore, and she wonders why she cares, why she keeps putting one foot in front of the other. Something makes her do that, something she can not quite fathom or reach, but is aware of none the less. It makes her rise from bed each morning. It makes her lift her sword in defense and offence, makes her kill time and time again.

Drowned in ashes, reborn in fire... One major enemy has been vanquished. A thousand remain... The Janus Clan has always been in opposition to the forces ruling human society. They've always been shunned and hunted. This process only turned even more pronounced when Phoenix Green Earth was founded in the late eighties. The struggle, the fight, the war intensified further, one tiny group of humans against the world, against the totality of modern human society. This is it. These are the final days whispered about for millennia. Lines in the sand once blurry, indistinct are drawn. The final enemy reveals itself. December 22, 2008 is approaching and almost everything will be explained. A cold shower of realization will hit humanity right where it hurts, and there will be no escape, nowhere to run for anyone. Everyone finally knows what is happening. The two Warrens, Liz and Ted are travelers. Even though they during a few short, hectic, sort of peaceful years resided in the ancestral home in London, they spent most of their lives Journeying across the vast reality of the world... beyond... on their path to a terrifying and remarkable destiny.

The return of the green Earth and true human freedom.

 Three years have passed, three years of relative tranquility. Then, nightmare visions strike from nowhere. Wales and the southwestern parts of England, the misty hills, the wet moors, the Cornwall coast are steeped in legends and stories. Somewhere there a beast is awakening, rising from its dark slumber, to visit its wrath upon the modern world. The city of Padstow is ravaged by death, a killer tearing to pieces its victims, leaving only parts of the body, enjoying human flesh. Fate has not been kind to Padstow and its inhabitants in recent years. The economy is in recession. The tourists, once the lifeblood of the area, are now staying away, far away. Old friends call Liz and Ted Warren, paranormal investigators and adventurers, to the city. They arrive in a place paralyzed by fear and suspicion. Blood flows in Padstow. They can smell it, from the highest tower to the lowest cellar, as above so below. Many things, many people hide there, some they know, some they don''t. But as they peel ever-thicker layers off the blanket hiding the town''s secrets they''re also closing in on their own riddles. They meet a man who can tell them everything, everything they''ve spent their lives wondering about. Fangs and claws of the Earth are tearing open the most confined of caskets. Padstow is the world, and the world is the stage where they must wage their battle.

  The name Forsaken has no religious connotations. It has far darker meanings than that…  Janet of the Blue Flame is truly forsaken, by everything and everyone she once held dear.  Her heart and her soul have been ripped out, her mind violated beyond repair. The cruel violet eyes are dry. There are no more tears left. She is hardly more than a shade, drifting through the dark corners of the realms.  In a tavern without doors she sets out to drink herself to death.  Weeks later, after already legendary binge drinking bouts to end all legendary binge drinking bouts a man comes to her with a proposal. He wants her on «his team» of sorcerers, one he wants to take him on a tour across the nine realms. She does not know why she agrees, whether or not it is because death has lost its appeal to her or because it has not, or because she just does not care.  There are maps, ancient lore describing the path they must take, and Janet has traveled parts of the Journey before, enough to know some of its perils, enough to scare her, if anything can scare her anymore.  Janet of the Blue Flame is set loose on this realm and all the next, like an attack dog that has broken its chains.

She has died a million times…Someone or something is stalking her. Stalking her from one world to the next, from day to night, from night to day. Wherever she walks it is there. Turn one way and it is ahead. Turn another and there it is. In branches moving in the wind. In old houses where every step on the dusty floor brings a creak from the wood. Afterglow is haunted and hunted, no matter where she goes. Janet Kathryn Caldwell is traveling the nine realms, all the nine realms and even beyond, in search of meaning, of anything tangible that might make her life make sense. What she finds is more mystery, more dark corners waiting for her. One revelation opens up nine more closed boxes slapping her in the face, grinning to her like banshees in the night, in the mists and twilights of the world. The nine lands in the nine realms are different, they are the same. Afterglow brushes them like the wind, and sometimes like the storm, making a brief stop, before moving on, leaving ruins in its wake. The Storm is coming. She knows this, beyond knowing, beyond certainty. Dark blades are cutting air, cutting flesh. An army of them is awaiting Afterglow, and she finds revelations, horrors and terrors aplenty, out there, on her way to nowhere. She does not know where she is going, only that she is going there, no matter what it takes, no matter where it may take her. Lightning strikes deep below the ground in Afterglow's path.

Twin towers are decorating the Manhattan skyline, paragons of oppression and destruction. Down below, in the Stone Desert's gray emptiness people are desperately striving to survive, to live a semblance of a life. Lewis Talbot and Carla Wolf are not who they are. They know this. But they don't know why, at least he doesn't. They are growing up. Carla is only eighteen, but she has already traveled the world, in search of what she may never find. Lewis is only fifteen, but strange stirrings and notions have haunted him since the early nights of his life. And they encounter many interesting people on their Journey, the four Warrens, Patrick, Ethel, Ted and Liz, Jean Gidman and Eric Carr, and others. They all have a reason for being in Modern York, for visiting, for living there. Ted and Liz arrive in town, sick and tired of life, of everything, desperately seeking Life, seeking renewal, a reason to go on living. Modern York is not so different from old York. War is being prepared there. Peace is being prepared there. The drama of life called the Janus Clan will come to a preliminary conclusion there. It's an old and true saying: Nobody is exactly who they appear. The question is what is lurking beneath the mask, below the surface, and what may happen when the masks fall.

Lawrence Watros is an ordinary man doing an ordinary office job. There is nothing exciting about it, nothing exciting at all. Each day is the same. Nothing ever changes. His existence is dominated by routine, by a regiment constantly repeating itself. Larry's life sucks. He certainly thinks so and he has found no one disagreeing with him on that. He has always looked at the patterns of his surroundings, never really making a production of it, but that is his forte, if anything is. Now, with one single event the pattern changes, is disrupted beyond recognition. He meets the girl of his dreams, but she isn't exactly miss congeniality. The first thing she tells him is that he's in danger, in mortal danger. It only grows weirder and more dangerous from there. His life changes irrevocably and it keeps changing from that one, startling event. The mighty river of time is blocked and takes a completely different path. This is an anthology of novellas and short stories and short short stories the author has written the last twenty years. It contains two novellas, four short stories and several short short stories.

  Damon Terrill is the Storm Child. He is born into the life-hostile civilization’s last years, as humanity starts on its return to nature, its return to Life.  It started with the need for Freedom, the passion of life, and went from there, in new and unforeseen directions, in one, final attempt to get it right.  – It’s the human being’s path through life, Anya told them. – What challenges, destroys and strengthens it.  The Thunder Road is making a turn. It always is. Burning Ice, Biting Flame... that is how life began. And that’s how it will renew itself. No matter where humans are going.And now the blade is laid bare, ready to be tempered once more. Humanity’s idiocy, their hubris has finally and fully been visited upon them. The End Time, the final hour,Ragnarok is here. The sea is rising, winds are growing in strength and numbers. A thoroughly rotten society is collapsing under its own weight.  Humans are natural nomads. Now they become nomads anew, pulled together in small tribes once more, pulled into a fellowship of fate in a final, desperate attempt tosurvive, to live the life humans are born to live. Finally. Damon, Anya, Andrè, Myriam and many others have started on their way Home. 

She can not rid herself of it, the sense of falling. It is lurking in her dreams,every time she looks at the world from the edge of her vision. The old, cruel oracle at the fair did not tell her anything she did not know.Janet of the Blue Flame is born a sorcerer, one with powers of the mind andthe body far exceeding those of most others, one in a line reaching far backin antiquity. In this modern age she, like many others is virtually unaware of thepotential resting in the murky parts of her being. She may know, deep down,but she is not aware... not until the day Malone the Sorcerer comes for her.Malone is dark and powerful. His skills and might are unquestionable. Hispower speaks to her, to her murky depths, roaring in her consciousness like astorm. Janet is only Sweet Sixteen and is overwhelmed in Malone''s presence.When he offers to train her, for her to become his apprentice she consentswith an eagerness of a mule chasing the carrot. He is everything she is not,everything she has ever dreamed of being. She leaves her friends and family,leaves behind everything she knows and joins the mighty and enigmaticsorcerer on his quest. His harsh teaching takes her far away, into the ninerealms and beyond. He gives her her devoirs, gives her everything he promised and more,wishing her good luck, leaving her to pick up the pieces of her life.Janet of the Blue Flame is ready for the world.

  She has died a million times…  Someone is stalking her. She knows this, knows it at the edge of her vision, where nothing really is seen, only dreamed. Her nightmares give her no peace. She turns and looks behind her. There is nothing there her eyes can see. But in the wind she can hear the wailing cry, the cry of Death. Sniffing that wind, she can smell the blood in her nostrils.  There is truth in flesh, they say… and there is truth in that. But there is also substance in what cannot be seen, cannot be touched. Claws and fangs cut ceaselessly through the night, looking for her. A silent cry is heard in the dark.  Someone… or something is stalking her.  She remembers a kind touch and a slap in the face, and hardly anything else.  Kathryn Caldwell is Afterglow, a woman of undetermined age, a strange creature wandering the dark corners of the world. Something happened to her once, something horrible, something she can never forget or put out of her mind. It is haunting her every second of her dark days, every moment of her pitiful sleep. She has become an empty shell, a pale imitation of the human being she once was. Long ago, as she measures time, she lost everything valuable in a human being, saw it fall through a crack, irreversible, never to be found again.  So she is wandering the darkened streets of the modern world, aimlessly, adrift, hardly ever seen, hardly ever there. People cannot see her, but she is there, present in their daily lives, an open wound that will never close.  No one is safe for Afterglow… 

  Lori is happily married. She and her husband of twenty years have three great children together. They have nice jobs and nice salaries, a nice house in a nice neighborhood. Life is good  Lori wakes up one morning, soaked in sweat after a particularly disturbing dream. Then she takes a good, hard look at herself in the mirror.  The world is no longer the same. She is no longer the same. The happy housewife and mother and company executive no longer exist. Suddenly familiar and pleasant surroundings are neither familiar nor pleasant. Increasingly disturbing events are pulling her ever further away from what she has known, confirming that the world has changed, that she has changed. She meets new people, people further opening her eyes to the world, to the world she has denied for so long. Perhaps her previous life and neighborhood and job and all weren’t so great, after all?  Lori is cast brutally out of her world and headlong into the next. The people she encounters, both friend and foe are very much like herself a new breed, seekers in a world where seekers are frowned at, at best, and at worst hounded and hunted. Lori doesn’t fit in in the old world anymore, and the new is still not quite there yet, emerging, like its people from the chrysalis, the dark corners and shadows of modern society.   They are the emerging Earth and Sky, Day and Night, and the world will never be the same. 

  There is a treasure at the end of the rainbow, or so the legend says, a place, an El Dorado, a Xanadu, a paradise, a heaven where all wishes are granted, a lush and peaceful garden people have been searching for since time immemorial.  Ted and Elizabeth Warren have finally, at a terrible cost claimed their name. They leave their fairly safe haven in the American Rockies, and they begin their tour, their Journey across the Earth. They cross the United States on a motorbike, first traveling west, stopping in Las Vegas, playing the stakes, throwing the dice, then traveling east and south, ending up in New Orleans, the City of the Dead, where they find more mystery, the mystery that is their life, find Life and find Death, find David Gidman, find Mark Stewart locked in a horrible battle of supremacy.  An eccentric millionaire invites them to accompany him on a treasure hunt in the South American jungle, and they go, go into the moist and hot jungle, to old and new pyramids, hiding terrible secrets. And everything else is traveling with them, every ghost, every shadow. Old enemies and friends… or both, join them there, in the lush, green and lethal surroundings. Ghosts of the past, ghosts of the future, and it’s all one.  Death, tangible and true, awaits them in the pyramid of fear. 

  The end is the beginning. The beginning is the end…  The once so great Caine Manor has become a ruin, one only fit for carrion birds and revenants. No one but daring children and crazed souls dare breach its confines.  The proud and shiny Caine Manor is an outstanding example of renovated architecture at the heart of the city.  Looking at the building, the house, resembling a castle, hidden in a strange, illuminated mist, squinting your eyes, it’s often hard to tell what’s illusion and what’s real. Reality shifts and burns around the Caine Manor, either ruin or proud house, reaching out with strands of night and fire to the surrounding areas and to existence at large. It is the center, or at least one center, in an ever-shifting world.  Is Chloe Webster dead or alive? Is Marion Dexter? Is Marlon Caine? Or David Fallon Somby? Are they perhaps both? Or neither? What is the world? Is it a brick, a hard, impenetrable wall or closer to something akin to mist and shadow? Existence might make sense, to us, to them, but only in glimpses, only in passing, beyond a corner somewhere ahead. They may wonder. They may die clueless. Because they don’t know, don’t know why terror strikes them and makes their heart beat like a sledgehammer in their chest.  From a place unbound by time and space alarums of reality are reaching out to touch and ultimately engulf them all. 

  New, emerging urban rebel guerilla groups, freedom fighters, called terrorists by enraged authorities are overwhelming Europe.  What is, in truth terrorism? Who does it to whom?  How much can a human being endure of bondage, injustice, degradation and destruction of spirit... before being fed up?  Present day society is a wound not closing.  In a modern world society destroying everything making life worth living there are those, who, through coincidence and fate, have decided not to take it anymore.  And as they are making that decision, together and as individuals, they are also starting on a journey, a journey back to humanity's roots.  Judith, Sivert, Kim, Willhelm, Anya and many more.  A handful of people against an entire world.  This is their story... 

  Ted and Elizabeth Warren are finally claiming their name. In the crowded city of London, in the wilderness of the American Rocky Mountains they come of Age, learning more of what and who they are.  Ted and Tilla settle in London, with many of their old friends. Their eyes are open, wide open. They see the world. They see it in every street, every house, see it for what it is, not the fairy tale they have been told, told from birth it is. And the world sees them. It reaches for them with its machinery and its dull claws. The past will not let them go, and neither will the future.  Elizabeth is growing up. She sees the falseness of it all, the reality behind the façade, the illusion. She is looking, looking for the truth of the world and also for the truth behind the mystery that is her life. And she finds it, finds the first sparks, the first exploding sparks. She is Changing, changing into something Other. Her body is changing, but most of all she is changing inside… into what she has always been.  The Janus Clan has been dormant for decades, but now it is once again, finally, asserting itself in the world, and they… and the world will never be the same. 

Venture into existence with Amos Keppler, into the rainbow, of red and green, shadow and pitch black. Experience Life through ShadowWalker's many senses. That's all, folks. Contains eight collections of poems, all 291 written from November 1989 to august 2003. The Green Rose 1989 - 1993 Cry of the Jester 1993 Poems of the Hot Wind 1994 to 1996 Travels And Revels, Life and Magick, Tales from Hell and Beyond - Aleister Crowley 1995 - 1996 The Infinity Cycle 1995 - 1998 Chronicles of Our Dreams 1998 - 2001 Diary of a Traveling Man 2002 TheBeautifulExcitingWorldinPieces January to August 2003 Also included are author's remarks and background material.