The Dark Lord and His Wily Mistress, a reading

In this audio recording I read a story in which extraordinary strength, intense presence, and seemingly magical powers lend the Dark Lord and his Wily Mistress, the husband and wife who are the two main characters, a sexy glamour as they work out a problem he's having: he wants to kill someone with a gun. A romantic, 19th-century aura combines with a very contemporary setting and dialogue as love and some surprising interventions create a redemption tale out of a horror story.

The writing is concise and lyrical, erotic and darkly humorous. I call the story a prose poem composed of several prose poems.

The Dark Lord and his Wily Mistress exhibit some of the characteristics of the iconic vampire invented in the 19th century, especially Count Dracula, the lead in Bram Stoker's novel Dracula, published in 1897. The vampire as a cultural figure intrigues me and I perform as a vampire in Vampiric Strategies, which I presented in 1991 and which is published in Monster/Beauty.

The images seen here are from the victorian garden series in the Joanna in the Desert series, a photo collaboration between Jill O'Bryan and myself from 2006. I began writing "The Dark Lord and His Wily Mistress" in 2008 and completed it in 2009. After writing this story I was surprised to see that the figure in the victorian garden photos is dressed in clothing that the Wily Mistress might wear and that the series conveys both a mysterious and 19th-century ambience, as does "The Dark Lord and His Wily Mistress." Also, the woman in the photo appears in a park-like setting not unlike the one in the story.