Leo’s collection offers nine crooked paths hidden in perpetual shadow. Each is dark, yet alluring. Which will you take? Which story have you lived? Which story will you live next? Modern-day Fifth Avenue becomes the scene of a murder stretching back in time to the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79AD. A diva confronts long lost love and stolen gold during her final performance at the New York Metropolitan Opera House. A jet-set crowd gathers for Halloween as witchcraft, love, and celebrities collide on Fire Island. In the manner of Edgar Allen Poe and The Grimm Brothers, these love stories are wonderfully alarming and seductively tragic. A galaxy of engaging stories about the ultimate price of love. Enter the world of Love’s Shadow: Nine Crooked Paths. Praise for Love’s Shadow: Nine Crooked Paths Love’s Shadow comprises nine elegant, finely wrought short stories that are bubbling over with enchantment and startling imagery. Leo’s sophisticated prose beckons the reader through realms of magic and seduction. Each tale deserves to be savored, as if sipped like a fine wine, line by line until the very end. -Nicholas Pearson, author of The Seven Archetypal Stones and Crystals for Karmic Healing Lawren Leo has a new collection out: Love’s Shadow: Nine Crooked Paths. A sorcerer with words, a magician of mood, Leo infuses his narratives with a visionary, almost painful beauty. - James Magruder, author of Let Me See It, Sugarless, and Worth Our Breath Leo’s dark, haunted fairy tales expose the thin veil between appearance and reality. In his stories there is a broad, deep continuum of personal history and narrative time collapsing into painful but rapturous present. Like Sicilian folktales, these stories feel as if they could have been written hundreds of years ago. They also often tease the boundaries between animals and humans, the living and dead, and the material and spiritual. While many of these stories end on a note of uncertainty and venture into the realm of the uncanny and the unknown, the collection read as a whole promises the triumph of love and beauty, loss as plenitude. - Marlene Hennessy, PhD
