{"id":1002,"date":"2025-02-15T14:48:30","date_gmt":"2025-02-15T14:48:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/andrew-may.com\/blog\/?p=1002"},"modified":"2025-02-15T14:48:32","modified_gmt":"2025-02-15T14:48:32","slug":"phallic-obsession-new-ebook-out-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/andrew-may.com\/blog\/2025\/02\/phallic-obsession-new-ebook-out-now\/","title":{"rendered":"Phallic Obsession – new ebook out now!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"Phallic<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

This is my first foray into fiction for several years. Actually the stories aren’t new, just “cleaned-up” versions of earlier stories that saw print elsewhere. Here’s what I say about them in the book’s introduction:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For over 30 years I\u2019ve been fascinated by various weird mystical beliefs \u2013 alternative religions, occult practices, New Age fads and so on. I always find it amusing how often sex \u2013 which you might naively think is completely out of place in such seemingly spiritual subjects \u2013 rears its head. In particular, many of these traditions have what can only be described as a distinctly phallic obsession, and it\u2019s this observation that inspired the three short stories collected here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The title story was my attempt at a Lovecraftian-style tale of \u201ccosmic horror\u201d, set in a typically Lovecraftian musty old museum \u2013 in this case, one devoted to the phallus as a religious icon. The second story, \u201cThe Cult of Zagoth\u201d, reflects the real-world tendency of the phallus to crop up in occult and esoteric rituals \u2013 often, I suspect, because the people who devised these rituals had something of a phallic obsession themselves. The final story \u2013 the shortest of the three \u2013 takes its title from the \u201cMasculine Cross\u201d theory of Hargrave Jennings, who saw phallic worship as the primordial religion from which all the others developed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe Masculine Cross\u201d was originally published under the title of \u201cThe Mystic Fayre Affair\u201d in an earlier story collection by me, The Museum of the Future<\/em>. I\u2019ve only made slight editorial changes to that one for this book, but the other two differ considerably from the versions which first saw print. They were both originally published by JMS Books, an erotic fiction imprint, as short standalone ebooks. For the present collection, however, I\u2019ve removed all the explicit sex scenes and other salacious elements, mainly to comply with Amazon Kindle guidelines, but also because I\u2019m not convinced they add anything!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2026 and here’s the book’s blurb:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The title story deals with the bizarre case of a disgraced professor of anthropology, Merrigan Blake, and her museum of sacred phallic iconography collected from all over the world. But there’s another, more sinister side to Dr Blake’s obsession – one that involves a vast conspiracy by an evil race of reptilian humanoids. It’s all in her mind, of course, but that makes it no less dangerous – as naive student David Gracewell discovers when he’s drawn into her world of crazy paranoia. The collection also contains two other stories on related themes, “The Cult of Zagoth” and “The Masculine Cross”. All three stories deal, at least in part, with the academic study of phallic symbolism, particularly in an occult or pseudo-religious context. But THIS IS NOT EROTIC FICTION.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Available as a Kindle ebook from Amazon.com<\/a>, Amazon UK<\/a> and all other Amazon stores.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is my first foray into fiction for several years. Actually the stories aren’t new, just “cleaned-up” versions of earlier stories that saw print elsewhere. Here’s what I say about them in the book’s introduction: For over 30 years I\u2019ve been fascinated by various weird mystical beliefs \u2013 alternative religions, occult practices, New Age fads … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Phallic Obsession – new ebook out now!”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[21,80,84,82],"class_list":["post-1002","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-my-books","tag-my-fiction","tag-new-age","tag-occult"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/andrew-may.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1002","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/andrew-may.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/andrew-may.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andrew-may.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andrew-may.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1002"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/andrew-may.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1002\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1026,"href":"https:\/\/andrew-may.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1002\/revisions\/1026"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/andrew-may.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1002"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andrew-may.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1002"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andrew-may.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1002"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}