What readers are saying . . .
“Unsettling, seductive, and steeped in grime and the otherworldly, The Black Maw is the kind of story that crawls under your skin and makes you question who, exactly, you’re rooting for.”
“A brooding descent into sorcery, sacrifice, and the strange intimacies of power.”
“The Black Maw is as if Clark Ashton Smith got drunk with Jack Vance and dared each other to write something fouler, darker, and more perversely elegant. Tizaar is no hero, but you can’t look away as he bleeds, bargains, and blunders through a world where the tower itself hungers and the demons are not merely summoned—but welcomed. A fever-dream of rusted grandeur and whispered blasphemies. I read it twice and had to sleep with a light on.”
“This isn’t your average grimdark. It’s lush, vile, and uncomfortably intimate. Tizaar is not a good man—he’s selfish, awkward, arrogant, and at times genuinely monstrous—but he’s real, and watching him spiral into an almost domestic kind of damnation with Marianne was both horrifying and weirdly compelling. The tower, the demons, the blood rites—it all feels like it belongs to some half-remembered occult folktale. It’s dark fantasy that cuts deep, then sits down for tea with you while the wound festers. Five stars.”
Tizaar and the Black Maw A tower that drinks blood. A sorcerer bound to demons. A girl caught in his curse.
Banished from the fog-choked courts of Anbolog under charges no one dares speak aloud, the goetist Tizaar wanders into the village of Davao-Noir, a settlement crouched at the edge of the eternal twilight land known as Gloomstrand. Here, time wears thin, language twists into unfamiliar shapes, and truth walks in shadow. Tizaar possesses only his mule, a sack of occult tomes, and the weight of four demons he has bound—Liliana, the succubus of Luxuria; Elinevera, mistress of Acedia; Xhosul, who feeds on Fear; and Vasskaul, the silent shadow of Pride.
Seeking obscurity, Tizaar instead finds a tower looming black against the thorn-cloaked hills. The villagers do not speak its name aloud, but in hushed voices they call it The Black Maw. Once a temple, or perhaps a prison, it now stands broken—yet not dead. When Tizaar lays hands on the altar, the stones groan. The tower stirs.
The Maw remembers blood.
When a young village woman named Marianne is caught leading Tizaar’s mule away, what begins as petty theft becomes an entanglement of trial, power, and sacrifice. By local law, Tizaar may pass judgment. But in Gloomstrand, justice is more than law—it is ritual. The altar is thirsty. The tower is watching. And Tizaar, seduced by old rites and voices that speak through stone, begins to believe he has found his place at last.
Yet Marianne is no lamb. She is neither pure nor wicked, neither victim nor villain. Bound to the tower by fate and blood, she matches Tizaar in stubbornness and will. What unfolds between them is not love, but something stranger: a shared doom, a partnership in captivity, and perhaps, a path to understanding the tower’s deepest hunger.
The Black Maw is a novella steeped in forbidden sorcery, arcane dread, and the murk of inhuman pacts. It is a tale of a man trying to master a place that cannot be mastered, of demons that feed on weakness, and of a girl who refuses to die quietly on an altar.
For readers who crave dark alchemy, cursed anti-heros, and sword-and-sorcery with teeth.
A 23,000 word novella.
$2.00 on the following platforms:
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