Adventures of V: Return of the Goddess
Written by Gilbert Reid
Twin Rivers Productions, 2020
“With a few brush strokes, Reid creates a whole world. It’s like magic — the reader is sucked into that world, instantaneously. V swirls us into an extravaganza, a detailed, delightful, dystopic, alien, familiar future — primal, ferocious and gratifying.”
— Susan S. Senstad
ADVENTURES OF V: RETURN OF THE GODDESS is an epic of seven volumes featuring a superheroine, V. Stunning, mischievous, and immortal, V is a 2600-year-old hybrid of alien and human. She is lusty, amorous, highly cultured, flirtatious, and irresistible to men and women — the reincarnation of an ancient pagan goddess — a bestower of life, an angel of death. She is also a vampire. “She lives off the blood of the bad, to rescue the souls of the good.”
Set on Earth in the future, with a few flashbacks to ancient and other times, the series takes us on a whirl-wind voyage to the end of the Anthropocene — and to the extinction of the human race. On the way, V confronts key themes of our time: the corruption of traditional religion, genetic engineering, cloning, mutants, Artificial Intelligence, religious fanaticism, pandemics, climate change, and the imminent end of the human world.
Books in the Series
Most can be read independently and out of order.
VAMPIRE VERSUS VATICAN: When the Devil takes up residence in Vatican City, he triggers financial scandals, assassinations, and ritual sacrifices. Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and tsunamis race around the world. The Earth, disintegrating, totters towards the Apocalypse. To head off total annihilation, V recruits a Jesuit exorcist, a Mafia killer, and a beautiful scientist. Together, they confront the source of evil itself. If V fails in her duel with the Devil, the Earth will explode. Humanity will vanish. Only a cold, dead asteroid belt will remain.
VAMPIRE CLONE: When V learns that billionaire-scientist Sabrina Jacobs has used her DNA to create a clone, she vows to hunt down and assassinate Sabrina and the 14-year-old Clone. As she sets off on a desperate chase across a dystopian America, V sows chaos everywhere – in superstores, diners, ice cream parlors, and elite strip clubs. The future of humanity hangs in the balance when V faces off against Sabrina. Just as she confronts the blood-soaked Clone in the South Pacific on Sabrina’s cutting-edge research ship, Andromeda, a giant typhoon closes in.
PANDEMIC 1: PARTY BALLOONS When a biological bomb bursts on the world’s largest cruise ship the Eden of the Seas, it instantly transforms 2,000 lawyers, and everyone else on board, into puppet-like zombies and voracious flesh-eating plants. V races to save her sworn enemy, Katherine du Bois Hughes, the president of the United States, from the cannibal chaos on the Eden. Then she must help the president overturn a fundamentalist coup in Washington, and stop the raging pandemic that threatens to annihilate the human race.
PANDEMIC 2: THE GATEWAY As the Zombie virus escapes from the Eden and spreads across America, V plunges deep into the Everglades to rescue a young woman who is about to give birth to the zombie anti-Christ. Caught in the whirlwind zombie Blitzkrieg, everyone fights to survive. In a last desperate gamble to stop the pandemic, V bounces through a mysterious gateway into an alternative universe. Risking her very soul, she confronts the Prince of Evil, the zombie Puppet Master, in a showdown that will decide the fate of the world.
EXTINCTION 1: GIRL WITH THE GOLDEN EYES When V heads deep into the Great Central Desert to rescue her fellow alien-human hybrids, she faces a challenge that threatens the very existence of humanity. An apocalyptic religion led by a creature that calls itself the Boy sweeps out of the west, promising the resurrection of humankind, but leaving in its wake nothing but destruction and death. In the path of the Boy are two elite Cosmos women, captured by desert mutants, and about to be sacrificed to the Goddess of the Mutants on a giant burning cross.
EXTINCTION 2: REVOLT OF THE ANGELS As the Boy’s Cult of Death sweeps across the desert, V races towards Camp Terminus where her fellow hybrids, as well as human dissidents, are imprisoned in a steamy inferno a mile underground. As V plunges into the sulfurous netherworld, the Boy’s monstrous true believers arrive, sowing terror and destruction. Victims morph into hideous ghouls. The pitheads collapse. Explosions, fires, avalanches, and floods trap V and the prisoners deep in a foul, turbulent, deadly labyrinth.
EXTINCTION 3: ELYSIUM Determined to save the human race from the Boy, V races to Elysium, the capital of the Cosmos Empire, the last bastion of humanity’s earthly rule. She discovers that the Boy has turned the World Mind and all technology against their human creators, raised the dead in a parody of the Rapture, and released a weaponized Bubonic plague. In a final desperate battle, V struggles desperately to prevent the extinction of humanity, and to save the universe from being overwhelmed by evil.
Reviews and Reader Reactions
PRAISE FOR ADVENTURES OF V
“With a few brush strokes, Reid creates a whole world. It’s like magic — the reader is sucked into that world, instantaneously. V swirls us into an extravaganza, a detailed, delightful, dystopic, alien, familiar future — primal, ferocious and gratifying.”
— Susan S. Senstad, author of Milk and Venom and Music for the Third Ear
“Vivacious, vampish, victorious, voluptuous, vibrant, villainous. An eternal 19-year-old, gorgeous vampire, monster-vixen named “V” — a pagan Goddess, reborn as a super-heroine beauty who lives off the blood of the bad, to rescue the souls of the good. Irresistible hijinks!”
— Ed Cowen, producer, impresario, a founder of CITY-TV
“A wild ride into adventure, fantasy, and chills, V gifted me with glimpses of arcane current and historical knowledge. Not for years have novels been as much fun and enlightening.”
— Chuck Shamata, actor
“Utterly engrossing, rich, dark, and deep, Gilbert Reid creates worlds within worlds of vivid, bold adventure.”
— Bernice Landry, artist, writer
“Gilbert Reid’s prose is so sensuous and evocative! When he takes you down unfamiliar paths, and into situations that excite suspension of disbelief, you follow him because the energy of V’s personality is so witty and alluring, she charms you into the universe the author has created. Vivid, complex, wildly imaginative.”
— Diana Leblanc, actress, director
“Writer Gilbert Reid has created, in Adventures of V, with immense forensic skill, a vast tapestry embracing the major themes confronting the world today. I found it un-put-downable. Five stars.”
— John McGreevy, television director, producer
“A glorious romp through the Vatican with V creating chaos on all fronts & it seems Earth is headed for annihilation. After this frenzy & gripping series of adventures V heads off to the US continuing to cause pandemonium & turmoil, upsetting all norms & sacred cows … I raced through Volume 1 & am now almost at the end of Volume 2 & can barely wait for the last page so I can continue on this fantastic merry-go-round with volumes 3-7 still ahead of me. What an epic vision. Congrats to Gilbert Reid, five stars plus.”
— Jennifer Puncher, television producer
“Vivacious, vampish, victorious, voluptuous, vibrant, villainous. An eternal 19-year-old, gorgeous vampire, monster-vixen named “V” — a pagan Goddess, reborn as a super-heroine beauty who lives off the blood of the bad, to rescue the souls of the good. Irresistible hijinks!”
— Ed Cowen
Buy the Books
Available in paperback and ebook formats. Visit the individual book pages for links to online retailers.
ADVENTURES OF V: RETURN OF THE GODDESS
Written by Gilbert Reid
Twin Rivers Productions, 2020