A warm welcome to author Jamie Fessenden joining us today here to talk about the fifth Gothika book , Contact
Welcome Jamie 🙂
Hi! I’m Jamie Fessenden, one of the authors in the upcoming anthology Gothika: Contact. This is the fifth installment in the Gothika series, which has featured androids, werewolves, voodoo curses, and ghosts! Contact is about encounters with extraterrestrials and alien abduction, and it includes four stories by me, F.E. Feeley, Jr., Kim Fielding, and B.G. Thomas.
Because all the Gothika anthologies were meant to be a combination of romantic and creepy, we often had to make decisions about how to mix the two elements. Should the hero fall in love with someone who hunts ghosts? Or should he fall in love with another person who is a ghost? In which case, how can the romance be resolved happily? Should the lovers be werewolf hunters or actual werewolves? And how will that work out?
When it came to alien encounters, we had to think about how different from us the aliens would be, and how that would affect any intimacy between our species and theirs. Each of us answered that question in our own way.
In my story, “Abducted,” I chose to make the aliens—or one group of them—humanoid, and not too radically different from humans. That, of course, has been done many times in books and film, but what made it interesting to me was the question, “Why, of all the aliens we could encounter, would the first ones look just like us?” Then it occurred to me that maybe it wouldn’t have much to do with us, at all. Maybe that “chance encounter” would have been orchestrated by the aliens, who had been searching a very long time, encountering races very different from themselves. When they finally stumble across a race of beings just like them, they’re fascinated.
So that’s why they’re here studying us: to find out just how alike we are, and how we managed to evolve so similarly.
Here’s a bit more about “Abducted.”
Blurb:
One night, Marc receives a frantic call from his friend, Cody. When he arrives at Cody’s isolated farmhouse, Cody is filthy, half-starved, and under the paranoid delusion that aliens are abducting him and implanting things in his body.
Marc agrees to stay one night, as long as his friend will go to the hospital in the morning. But Cody isn’t mentally ill. Aliens have been abducting him, and in the process of trying to stop it from happening again, Marc is abducted himself. But that’s just the beginning of his nightmare.
Marc learns of two alien races at war. To make matters worse, the Alzhen have Marc and the evil Karazhen have Cody. Marc’s only ally is Dalsing, the Alzhen security chief he feels an unexpected attraction to. They’ll have to learn to trust each other if they’re going to rescue Cody… and prevent the creation of a deadly biological weapon.
The question had been so casual, I thought I’d misheard him. “What?”
“You have been trying to appear uninterested, but you seem curious about my body.”
“I can’t help it!” I exclaimed. I pointed at his crotch. “You keep flashing me!”
“Flashing? Isn’t that something involving bright light or explosives?”
“It also means letting your clothing slip open, so other people can see your… private parts.”
He looked at me curiously. “Private parts?”
Oh, for fuck sake. “Your genitals, your crotch, your… sex organs—whatever you call them. You’ve seen mine, dangling between my legs—not that I asked you to look at them.”
“Oh yes.” He smiled. “Of course.” Then his expression turned to one of concern. “I apologize if removing your clothing violated one of your cultural taboos. Our anatomy is a bit different, so… it isn’t the same for us.”
That piqued my interest again. For all I knew, he was just an outer space pervert who got off on waving his ding-a-ling at the natives, but that didn’t really bother me. I just didn’t like the implication that I was a pervert. Still, if he was offering….
“How is your anatomy different?”
“Would you like to see? Or would you prefer I simply describe it?”
“You can show me if you want,” I replied, trying to sound nonchalant. I guess I was just a little perverted, because I was already stiffening up at the thought of what might be under that robe. Fortunately, my dick was safely tucked away under my robe.
He stood and let his robe slip from his shoulders.
My jaw must have hit the floor. Not because he had some hideous tentacle-monster thing writhing in his crotch or anything like that, but because it was just the opposite. There was nothing there. He had a pubic mound like a human, which was as hairless as the rest of him, but it was completely smooth. No dick, no nothing. It was completely featureless, apart from a thin brown line traveling up from between his legs to his navel. His body was muscular and pretty much a work of art, even with the four nipples, but… well, so much for alien porn. He was a Ken doll!
I tried not to look disappointed. No point in creating an intergalactic incident over penis size. Or… lack of penis altogether. “It’s very nice,” I said diplomatically.
Dalsing laughed. “If you are referring to my ‘private parts,’ you can’t see them. They are here.” He cupped his crotch in what would have been a lewd gesture for a human male. “Inside. This is why clothing for us is merely functional.”
“I see.” I pictured that thin line splitting open like a seam. “So it… comes out, when you need it to?”
“Yes. We reproduce the same way your species does. One carries the egg inside her body—we call our females ba-len—and the male, the ba-ti, inseminates it.”
“And you are… ba-ti?” I asked, just to be clear. He looked male, but I could have been wrong.
“Yes. Unfortunately I cannot easily show you my ‘private parts.’ I must be aroused in order for them to emerge.”
This was beginning to sound like the lead-in to a cheesy porn film. “Let me show you how my species mates, earthling.” Boom chicka wow wow…. But although I was, in fact, still curious about his anatomy, I discovered I’d hit my limit for how crass I could be with a space alien. We weren’t even on a first-name basis.
“That’s okay,” I said. “I’ve satisfied my curiosity.”
Sort of.
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