A Rampant Update, Fan art, and Signing News

Since it’s clearly been too long. 😉

So, RAMPANT, now in it’s second printing (yay!), continues to garner rave reviews across these here interwebs:

TOR.com (MAJOR SPOILER WARNING IF YOU CLICK THROUGH TO READ THE WHOLE THING) calls Rampant‘s unicorns “delightfully nasty” and Read Now Sleep Later opines “Peterfreund pulls it off with Buffy-like strength and agility (and fashion sense, and weapons/tactical skills)” and calls it a “stay up all night!” read.

(To be perfectly honest, I don’t get the bit about the fashion sense. I feel like sometimes my books get tarred with the “books about fashion” brush because I write in a chick litty first person voice. I know Buffy had that bottomless closet of leather pants — honestly, it made no sense given her financial struggles — but my characters tend to dress more simply for hunting. They wear nothing of interest in the entirety of Rampant. Jeans, cargo pants, sweaters, tank tops, a few skirts when they are out on the town. The nicest item of clothing in the entire book (an angora blend sweater) is drenched in blood by page 10. If you read books for clothes, Rampant is not going to satisfy a craving. You’ve been warned.)

(In passing, someday I should write a book about clothes. I do love clothes.)

Yan at Books By Their Cover gives a somewhat spoilery review (I’m just passing along the warnings!), and also says:

“Move over My Little Pony someone has come to take your place—Bonegrinder (lovely name isn’t it?). Killer unicorns has yet to ever cross my mind until this book popped up so kudos to Diana for creating an addictive, originally, enthralling, super awesome book. From page one to page I WANT MORE! I was captivated by the gruesome bloody battles, cute exchange students, and shiny claymores. (4.5/5 stars)”

And Speed-Reading Book Nerd, a longtime reader of the SSG books, puts in her two cents (SECTIONS WHITED OUT FOR SPOILERAGE):

“This is a book about killer unicorns. And it’s awesome. Even beyond the “snicker, dude, I’m reading a book about killer unicorns” factor, this book has depth, power, plenty of interesting questions to think about, conspiracies, and more. AWESOME.”

and

“But Things Happen. Major, shocking, mindblowing things. Deeper questions about the unicorn world are pondered, a conspiracy appears to be going on, one character [SPOILER WHITE OUT STARTS HERE] has a drastic change of life circumstance (note: this may trigger issues in some people, but I think it’s relevant to cover in this book and I think it’s handled about as well as it could be),[SPOILER WHITE OUT ENDS HERE] and Astrid meets a shocking ally and needs to decide how she’s going to handle things.  I particularly loved how Astrid’s wannabe-scientist-ness starts to come in handy as she finally finds a way to put it to good use on behalf of the hunters. Neat-o.

“Dear god, this is good. So much more depth than you would expect from the subject. I am really intrigued to find out what happens next.

“Five stars.”

So there’s that round up.

In other news, I’m doing a signing this Saturday, September 12, at the Barnes & Noble in Tyson’s Corner, VA. Please come! More info available on my Events page.

And, finally, I just received my very first Rampant Fan Art! What I like about these pieces is that they so accurately portray the scenes I wrote

Astrid and the Zhi, by Elina Johnston

From Rampant:

There it was, just a few trees over. Standing, frozen, as if waiting. I stepped into the tiny clearing, and the creature emerged from the shadows.

And no, it was not a deer.

Not a goat, either, though that would be the closest term I could use to describe the way it looked. A goat, or maybe some sort of small antelope. Its fur was white and shaggy, and reminded me a bit of the hair on a llama. Its back was about thigh-high, and its head and neck hovered somewhere near my waist. Of course, the horn made the creature look much bigger. Protruding in a straight line from the center of its forehead, it was easily the length of my forearm, and twisted like a screw.

Suddenly, I couldn’t breathe. My mother’s psychosis was not only genetic, it had uniformity of type as well. I was seeing unicorns.

The unicorn looked up at me with eyes as blue as a Siamese cat’s, and let out a little bleat that sounded nothing whatsoever like fairy bells. It stepped forward cautiously. This was no hallucination. I prepared to be rammed through the heart, and wondered idly if the poison was very fast-acting.

Now I wish I’d paid attention to Lilith all those years. Of course, if I had, I’d simply think that unicorns didn’t exist anymore, rather than that mom was nuts and they’d never existed in the first place.

The unicorn was only a few inches away from me now. I couldn’t look away. But then it bent one leg and swept into what looked for all the world like a very low, very formal bow. The tip of its horn missed my body by millimeters in its semicircular trip to the ground.

Clothilde and Bucephalus, by Elina Johnston

From Rampant:

As my eyes adjusted to the dimness, I saw before me the outline of a woman and a beast on a raised dais in the center of the room. I approached, only to be met with another set of statues—though these looked more like the mannequins and stuffed figures you’d see in a natural history museum diorama than the hunks of marble in a sculpture gallery. A bronze plaque at the base of the dais identified the figures, and I dropped my backpack in surprise. Clothilde and Bucephalus.

The woman wore a dress of real purple silk, faded somewhat where the sun filtered in from the windows above. Long blonde hair not unlike my own hung from beneath an elaborately folded headdress of indigo purple and brilliant white. Her mannequin face was as white as porcelain, her eyes bright marbles with blank black centers. In her hands she brandished a gleaming sword against the monster before her.

It was as big as an elephant. The hide was a deep chestnut red and in consistency something between a horse and what I imagined from a wooly mammoth. The nostrils flared on a long, wide snout, and its mouth was open in a snarl, revealing jaws that would make a sabertooth tiger feel envious. Each cloven hoof was the size of a truck tire and the beast stood in an aggressive pose, tilting a curved, creamy yellow horn as thick and long as my leg directly back at the hunter.

Pretty cool, huh? Thanks, Elina!