Preface

A Synopsis of Past Tales

I always recommend starting the Tales from the beginning. However, I will make concessions for memory, since this book took some time to complete after I uploaded the last one.

In general, the Tales are two stories in one. The first occurs in the present, so to speak, and is written in the first person past tense. Joe Solomon's perspective. Perhaps ironically, the second occurs in the past, over a millennium ago in this instance, but is written third person in the present tense. The reason for this is that Joe, and the rest of the audience for Snake's Tale, receive Nick's (or an angel's) narrative as if actually experiencing it. They are there in the ancient world.

In the so called present day story, Joe meets Nick, a tall mysterious old man with snake like facial features, in San Francisco, where Joe attends a summer playwright workshop at ACT, his play, "The Perfect Drug," having been one among five to win the prestigious contest. Four others include Tash, a svelte, goth woman, and Lindy, an unusually thickly built, but not fat, modern dancer and choreographer and, of course, playwright. Joe finds himself attracted to Lindy, but too shy to do anything.

Meeting Nick changes that. More importantly, a luscious Greek woman apparently his same age, helps him get some nerve. The woman, Helena, an escort, with Nick seeming to be her pimp, becomes his companion for the night. In the morning, she trains him to date Lindy.

That same morning he meets her fellow escorts, like her astoundingly beautiful and sexy. A blonde bombshell with obvious brilliance, Betty, and a Jewish Princess, Naomi whose beauty and incredible body gets tainted by a whiny voice.

During this encounter, the idea of the Tales begin. Several graphic novels depicting the various skins of Nick. Joe's talent as a writer begins the idea, and Naomi's genius as a drawer of amazing if disturbingly visceral images completes it, with Betty's brilliant mind useful as editor.

Unbelievable at first, Nick proves his immortality to Joe. The skins constitute Nick's changes in appearance over his millennia of existence, like a snake shedding. The women Joe meets end up being immortal themselves, what Nick calls his angels. Though related to him, most are second generation, his granddaughters. Helena's his daughter, as is Alexandra, his Russian angel. Only one angel becomes conceived for each skin with two exceptions. Maddy and Maggie are identical twins, petite Irish redheads. But most unusually and perhaps significantly, Helena is the second conception in Nick's current skin, Naomi being the first.

Helen, actually the real (so to speak) Helen of Troy is his oldest living angel, looking very much like Botticelli's Venus, the actual model for it. And yes, they can be killed, usually by decapitation, which happened to his first angel, a Babylonian. Helen rebelled against her grandfather, choosing to be with another eternal man, or eternal wanderer, named Simon, Nick's nemesis. Although her rebelliousness weakened, and Helen ended up being, either purposefully or unknowingly, a spy in Simon's camp.

Simon has a diametrically opposed agenda from Nick. He has a god complex and an interest in world domination. And unlike Nick, whose skins have included a deep black and a Moorish mix and the dark color and Caucasian face of a man from India and the oriental look of a Southeast Asian and so forth, Simon always looks white, and he always gets more handsome with each new skin. His agenda parallels Hitler's, the dominant Aryan race, and he in fact helped Hitler. Eva Braun was one of his angels.

It turns out Joe is quite the stud, literally. Somehow he impregnates Helena, something only an eternal wanderer is supposedly capable of doing. In fact, Nick has impregnated one of his angels, his Indian one, and she ended up becoming mortal. This worries them, and the child being stillborn, though it gets proved that Helena seems to retain her immortality.

Simon, hearing of this, introduces Eva (Eva Braun's namesake) to Joe and Helena, who have fallen in love. Simon's youngest angel, an incredibly beautiful and sexy (of course) California blonde, and as brilliant as Betty, Nick's blonde angel, she gets pregnant as well, and amazing everyone, including her, falls in love with Joe and Helena.

With Helen comes an avant guard quartet, who become involved with music for Lindy's choreography. Especially Angelique, the French member of the group, and the genius, and the two fall in love, and include Joe in their bed as often as possible, especially for Angelique. The four ladies of the quartet look like Helen, and Joe refers to them as her clones, except only one has Helen's blonde hair, Elsa. Ellen, a redhead, and Consuela, a hot-blooded raven haired Spaniard, complete diversity of hair colors, with Angelique a dark brunette. At Helen's disturbing insistence, Joe impregnates her clones.

After successful performances of the workshop plays, Joe marries Helena and they head eventually to Paris, where the quartet has an important residency, including a weekend of performances at the Paris Opera. There Joe meets Xo, another eternal wanderer, the last of them (actually the oldest), who, like Simon, sticks to his Chinese origination, with some exceptions. For instance, he has an angel from his Japanese skin. He also, like Simon, improves his looks with each new skin, becoming the definition of Chinese male beauty. Even with those similarities, he becomes allied with Nick. And he brings his youngest angel, an adorable a young Chinese woman named Zhenzhen, for Joe to impregnate and to fall in love with.

In Paris, skirmishes between Nick and Simon include Simon's skillful use of chemistry combined with attempted brainwashing. His plan to capture Joe for such an attempt becomes thwarted, though he does succeed with the Helen clones and with his daughter, Seraphine, a Jewess from an old rich Parisian Jewish family, saved from the Nazis by Simon, whose seed produces every other generation of only daughters. Their questionable support of fellow Jews also protects them. Fortunately the brainwashing (and the villainous rape accompanying it) does not last. In fact, Angelique barely succumbs to it.

The chateau which these generations of Jewesses own becomes a place for rehearsal for Lindy's choreographic collaborations with Angelique and the quartet. As demonstrated by the attempted abduction of Joe, being in the enemy camp has its problems. But it also provides Joe with yet another lover and receiver of his potent sperm, Seraphine, the youngest generation of the Jewesses and Simon's daughter. The voluptuous beauty becomes infatuated with him, no less because he discovers her need to be dominated, for him to be her master.

Chapter 1 »