Frank J Perez
Epic Fantasy • Urban Fantasy • Speculative Sci Fi • Speculative Fiction
Frank J. Perez has never written the same story twice, mythic war epics, dark fantasy, comedic satire, urban fantasy adventure, each one built from scratch, in its own world, with its own rules.What keeps surfacing anyway, book after book, is a single unresolved question:What does it cost when the people holding power are more certain than they are accountable.He hasn't answered it yet.
He calls the ongoing search A Different Door.
Six so far.
A Different Door is a series of stories, each approaching the same underlying questions from a different genre, world, and emotional register.Some are comic, some speculative, some mysterious, and some deeply serious, but all examine the strange, difficult, and often contradictory ways people make sense of life.
A Different Door
THE LIGHT BRINGER
Eternal Cycle: Book One
THREE FUTURES, NO REFUNDS
Different Door Novel
SIENNA
Dark Legends: Book One
SCATTERED NAMES
Eternal Cycle: Book Two (coming soon)
Special Introductory Price $0.99
The Eternal Cycle
BOOK ONE: THE LIGHT BRINGER
The Twelve have ruled the whole of creation for longer than memory holds.
D'HarmaSan has served their order the same way, for just as long.Until the day she deliberately reaches into a stillness she was never permitted to disturb.
And a universe answers back.What she creates, she hides.
Two small worlds, tucked far from the order she has sworn her whole existence to.To watch over them, she makes a son: Luxfer, gentle-eyed and curious, who will come to love both worlds so completely that his love becomes the very thing that unmakes them.D'HarmaSan must finally answer for what she has done.
Luxfer must decide what kind of god he is actually willing to become.As Luxfer's devotion hardens into a golden kingdom promising to end all suffering by ending all choice, and as the Twelve she has spent an age deceiving begin to notice a universe that was never supposed to exist.For readers of Ursula K. Le Guin, Madeline Miller, and Susanna Clarke, The Light Bringer is patient, luminous, and unafraid to ask the oldest questions as if for the first time.
THIS BOOK WAS NOT SUPPOSED TO EXIST.
REALITY HAS ALREADY FILED A COMPLAINT.
You have read the multiverse sagas. The six-timeline ones. The ones with four warring factions, a very serious prophecy, and roughly nine hundred pages before anybody makes a joke. Somewhere around book three, you began skimming.This is not that book. Reality would like that clarified for the record.Three Futures, No Refunds begins with a birth. Specifically, an impossible one.The hospital classifies the resulting child as "a contradiction with blankets and a pillow."
Within days, he teaches a bright red ball to duplicate itself sixty-four times and nearly ends civilisation before lunch. A committee is formed. Then several more. None of them help.It only gets worse from there, which means considerably better.Teenage and grown versions of the same child begin arriving through walls to argue about how he should be raised, while an exhausted, note-taking and deeply overworked cosmic bureaucrat Reality tries, and repeatedly fails, to keep the paperwork under control.If Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett once made you laugh out loud on public transport and you have been waiting for someone to attempt it again, properly, this is that attempt.
For the record, this book also contains:Reality itself, filing Administrative Observations about a child it never authorised and can no longer legally disown.
A six-year committee meeting convened to determine whether "unexpected outcomes" qualify as mistakes.
(They do not reach a conclusion. They do produce several reports.)
Three versions of one person attempting to parent themselves, with predictably mixed and occasionally moving results.
A corporation that found a way to monetise the apocalypse, a Department of Unlikely Outcomes, and a treehouse that appears to be holding several lives at once.
Eleanor, who the universe cannot seem to reshuffle away, no matter how hard it tries.
An ending. It arrives quietly. It is earned.
Reality has already decided this happened. As the title suggests, there are no refunds.Buy Three Futures, No Refunds today.
The committee has reviewed the alternative and does not recommend it.
I'm often asked about my books and stories. What are they? What genre? How many pages?And honestly, it's kinda hard to put into an elevator pitch!There's not one genre, one voice, one story arc or one of anything!I've written novels, trilogies, the beginning of trilogies, and so many ideas for so much more covering:
A girl destroyed by a cruel city who sacrifices everything for her son.A comedic government ministry that can't explain why its own methods work.A demigod raised by wolves and weaponised by an angel who lied to him from the day they met.None of these share a world. None of them share a genre. I built each one meaning to do something entirely different from the last.And without fail every single time I end up back at the same unanswered question.What actually happens to the people who pay for somebody else's certainty.
What is the cost when the ones holding power care more about being right than being accountable for the ways they're wrong?Are they even wrong?Do They Believe They Are Wrong?
I don't think I've ever actually answered it. I've just tried a different door each time, a different genre, a different world, a different kind of person standing underneath the weight of somebody else's confidence, hoping this particular story might finally get me there.It hasn't, yet.I've started calling the whole ongoing attempt A Different Door.It's neither a series nor a shared world.Just an honest name for what I keep doing anyway, one book, one genre... one door at a time.That's six so far.I'll update the count whenever I open another one, and I'm not feeling lazy about updating.