Adventures of V: Volume 8
The Vampire and the Bard
A romantic, erotic, sexy, action-packed comedy, set in Elizabethan England, starring Elizabeth I herself, William Shakespeare, and many ladies and gentlemen, strumpets and adventurers, actors and lowlifes.
Our heroine, V, an ancient pagan vampire, is, of course, a woman, and, occasionally, when the mood takes her, a reptilian demon. But she is disguised, for the occasion, as a gallant young Italian nobleman, Raphael Visconti della Rovere. Accompanied by her pageboy Cesario (really a girl), V — or Raphael — is sent by the Pope in 1592 to England to help underground Catholic plotters assassinate Queen Elizabeth I. With everyone in travesti, disguises wreak havoc. Everyone falls in love with everyone, and everyone fights with everyone. Charming, brilliant Cesario, at age 12 or 13 — she is a genius — must sort out the catastrophes as they cascade down. V fights a duel with the man she loves. And, even worse — V finds herself forced onto the stage — as a chap playing a girl playing a chap — by a neophyte fingernail-chewing near-bankrupt dramatist Will Shakespeare. Chaos in every possible direction ensues. V and Cesario do manage at least to try to accomplish their real mission — which was — since V was a counter-agent working for English Intelligence — to save the Queen.
This is Shakespeare in Love meets Twelfth Night meets Virginia Woolf’s Orlando meets a spoof of John Le Carré or James Bond.
Buy the Book
The Vampire and the Bard
By Gilbert Reid
Twin Rivers Productions, 2021
Available as a Kindle Select/Kindle Unlimited ebook
Soon to be available in paperback
