The Samodiva Queen

A foreign tourist vanishes into the forest after following a goat with a Hello Kitty medallion. A tongue becomes a key. A village coven asks for help translating a survival show over hacked Starlink. A wedding story ends in mud, blood, and a dead goat. A realtor disappears in the mountains after leaving an inn with a girl too beautiful to be safe. A dead horse becomes a village landmark. And somewhere behind it all, the samodiva queen is passing through the world in a form the present no longer has the eyes to recognize. The Samodiva Queen: Balkan Neogothic Vol. I gathers five linked stories from a world where the old powers never left. They come through cheap cigarettes, pop-folk parties, contraband technology, village gossip, bad roads, dead animals, old women, dirty jokes, smoke, rakia, and the wrong kind of beauty. Samodivas, molfars, mavkas, witches, and older things move through the broken surfaces of the present, wearing whatever face the age deserves. Comic, brutal, mythic, and uncanny, these stories follow a narrator who keeps surviving encounters he does not fully understand. Each survival leaves a trace. Each trace becomes a debt. By the time he stands before the Queen, the question is no longer whether the old world is real. The question is whether he is still edible.