Preface

It's best (and I hope a lot more interesting) to read Snake's Tales from the start, but since it's already been a bit of a journey, and the delay between books has been unfortunately quite long, I thought I'd try to sum up where we've travelled for the uninitiated or those needing a bit of reminding.

Everything begins in San Francisco, where Joe Solomon first meets Snake or Nick. Joe has been chosen as a playwright for a prestigious (and fictitious) early summer workshop at ACT (real but fictionalized). He has a bit of a crush on Lindy, a fellow playwright, but shyness keeps getting in his way. His frustration provokes an evening of bar hopping, and the encounter with Nick occurs after the last bar closes.

Nick appears to be a thin, almost skeletal old man as tall as Joe (six and a half feet) whose presence both frightens and intrigues him. The man lures Joe to an apartment in the Tenderloin where he meets Helena, a voluptuous dark haired and completely seductive beauty of Greek extraction. It turns out she's a prostitute, a call girl, and Nick is her pimp. They negotiate a very good deal for an all-night session and end up having incredible sex. It's important that Helena and Joe share some Greek wine from her mother's vineyard.

In the morning, Joe meets her fellow escorts, Naomi, a gorgeous Jewess with an unpleasantly nasaly voice and a bit of a whiner, and Betty, an exquisite blonde bombshell whose mind is as bright as her presence. Also in the morning, after coaching by Helena, Joe sets up a date with Lindy. In addition, Naomi shows her collection of intense and visceral drawings, and Nick coalesces that and Joe's writing skills into the creation of a series of graphic novels depicting his life. That his life is millennia long, he's described as an eternal wanderer, has become suggested and not quite accepted by Joe.

Joe gets an invitation via text on his cell phone for a party at Nick's hotel suite in Knob Hill just at the end of his date with Lindy. Helena appears in a fancy limo at the location of a jazz bar where the two had seen a show to take him and Lindy to Nick's. Somehow during the ride, the idea that Helena may be more than a paid lover for Joe becomes noticed by all three.

At the party, Joe sees more amazing looking women entertaining various mostly older men sexually. The three end up entering the smaller bedroom of the suite where Betty and Naomi, without much interest, get two men off and kick them out. Lindy becomes instantly focused on Betty even though she's never had lesbian inklings, or pursued them at least, before. Joe enjoys Naomi and Helena beside Lindy and Betty, and in the end, he also enjoys Betty, and more privately, Lindy.

In the morning, post party, Lindy and Joe meet most of the rest of Nick's women. It is also made clear that the wine he has drunk, and Lindy has as well, contains an aphrodisiac, the source of which is Nick's semen (thankfully well disguised in the pungent wine).

Nick's women are referred to as his angels, all descendants of Nick. Usually they are granddaughters or great granddaughters, but a couple, including Helena, are actually his daughter from an incestuous relationship between Nick and another of his progeny. They are, like Nick, eternal. Each of them are conceived during one of his "skins" which is how he describes his various lives looking very different from each other. For instance, his oldest living angel had come from his life as a black African, and she looks much like he had. Naomi and Helena have been conceived in his latest iteration, actually a unique (and significant) event. The "skins" actually occur, like a snake, when Nick shucks off an old skin revealing a new one.

Joe and Lindy meet the rest of his angels by the time Nick begins his tales. They include Rosa, a mix of Spanish and Native American from South America, a brilliant and warm woman. And Miwa, from his Japanese skin, the one previous to his newest skin, a lithe and graceful Japanese woman, whose skills include cat burglary (Her nickname is Cat) and modern dance. The latter skill unites her with Lindy, also a skilled modern dancer and brilliant choreographer, and they become lovers while Lindy uses her (and Joe) for her choreography.

The Irish identical twins Maddy and Maggie are sweet and petite redheads with the attribute of twins of finishing each other's sentences, except even more in tune than usual. And there's Alexandra, a statuesque woman of Slavic origin whose mother's demanding nature caused her to be the other incestuous daughter/angel. She's very close (and diametrically opposite in features) to the Siamese cutie, Chanda, a filmmaker in her homeland.

And last, but definitely not least, the oldest living angel, Salomé appears to be the embodiment of Nefertiti, a regal, wise and incredibly capable woman who defines the beauty of Ethiopian women. In fact, each in their way, all the angels define beauty with a healthy heaping of sexiness.

Four of his angels aren't with Nick anymore. Three died, including his first, Aziza, from Mesopotamia, along with a woman of the Indian subcontinent, and, most memorably, Cleopatra. The fourth chose Nick's eternal nemesis to become her master instead of Nick. She happens to be Helen of Troy.

We encounter her and her master, Simon, during the productions of the plays of Joe and Lindy and the three other playwrights who won the contest to be involved in the playwright workshop. They enter the auditorium and sit as audience in the midst of a quarrel one might witness from an old married couple who know each other's buttons all too well. Of course, Helen is quintessentially beautiful, looking facially and bodily like the famous Venus in the Half Shell, and in fact claims she modeled for it. Simon is just as handsome in a classic blond Aryan sort of way. In hair, body and face he represents that ideal purposely, feeling, in much the same way Hitler felt, that such hair and body and facial features represent the best man can be. The similarity isn't coincidental, as he backed Hitler in his insane attempt at world domination, placing that famous mistress Eva Braun, one of his angels, beside the mad man.

Something's up (and it's not clear quite yet what that might be) with the events going on, i.e. the workshop. Both Helen's and Simon's appearance amidst it are incredibly unusual events. Nick and Simon rarely find themselves near each other let alone in the same room. An occasional skirmish occurs almost always via representatives, either angels or minions, that is, the offspring of Simon and Nick who have a telepathic link to them. The angels have a similar mental link, and one that's much stronger and clearer than the minions have. It's as if the two eternal wanderers are closing ranks, especially considering Helen's presence. She has not been seen by Nick since she chose his enemy to be with.

The concept of minions is an essential one for both eternal wanderers. Those two immortals mate with a diversity of women in order to conceive these people who are like their foot soldiers just as the angels are like their officers as it were. The more minions, the more presence, or in Simon's case, power they have in the world, moving it towards each immortal's agenda.

And speaking of minions and the closing of ranks, Helen is accompanied by four women, minions of her as much as of Simon, who, though with different European heritages, including a Spanish, a French, a Scandinavian and a Scots, and thus with four different hues of hair amongst other differences, look remarkably like her. They are the Double Q or Quadruplet Quartet, mostly string players, but they all have ability to play other instruments as well as sing. Led by Angelique, the French Helen clone (a term Joe calls them), they play mostly contemporary music, often composed by Angelique, a genius. They, especially and more directly Angelique, end up collaborating with Lindy on music for her choreography which, if she and Joe and company aren't busy enough putting together performances of their plays, Lindy creates during rehearsals very early in the morning.

She uses a space brought to her by her angel lover Miwa using one of her past lovers. This brings up a significant ability both the eternal wanderers and their angels have. Barnaby, an important choreographer of modern dance, had known Miwa decades before, so when they meet again, she can't look the way she looks to Joe and Lindy. To them, she and the other angels look to be no older than their early thirties, at the peak of their beauty, but Barnaby needs to see her at least edging towards fifty, and he does. Simon and Nick are most proficient at this altering of perception. For instance, Nick takes a lead role in Joe's play, and needs to look like a vital younger man to the audience, and that's exactly what they see.

This collaboration between essentially Simon's minions and Lindy becomes so successful that it continues past the workshop and the coinciding dances so that Angelique and her half-sisters end up working on music for Joe's and Lindy's plays as well as their fellow playwright, the tall, lean, pale, black haired and Goth looking Natasha's, who directs Lindy's play (Lindy directs Joe's) and directs Joe in it. Nick, via minions, has set up a showcase for Lindy in her hometown of Boston. This also leads Nick, his angels, and Joe and Lindy to meet in Paris to see the Double Q in a hugely important performance for them at the Paris Opera and for Lindy and Angelique to continue their dance collaborations and for the Tales to continue as well, which is where "Africa" happens, but I'm getting ahead of myself. Unfortunately I'm not yet done summarizing.

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