LOVE IN DARK SETTINGS OMNIBUS ¶ By Dusk Peterson

2010 Edition

Sections below: About Love in Dark Settings Omnibus | Ordering information | Contents of the latest edition | Unzipping instructions | Parental guidance note and disclaimer.

About Love in Dark Settings Omnibus

For the price of a hardback, you can buy Love in Dark Settings Omnibus, a zipped HTML e-book with all of Dusk Peterson's online fiction as of July 2010: over a million words (6 novels, 13 novellas, 5 novelettes, and 12 short stories) of suspenseful fantasy, historical fantasy, science fiction, contemporary fiction, and leather fiction in the genres of friendship fiction, heterosexual fiction, and gay fiction.

As a bonus, the e-book also contains 30 collections of fiction recommendations and nonfiction, including annotated lists of hundreds of novels, short fiction, and memoirs, online and in print: friendship fiction, gay fiction and erotica, original slash and yaoi, leather fiction, Victorian and Edwardian writings, science fiction, fantasy, historical fantasy, and historical fiction.

Ordering information

ZIPPED HTML E-BOOK – Love in Dark Settings Omnibus. 2010 edition. $19.99. (Problems ordering?)

Contents of the 2010 edition

Sections below:

Main Bookshelf: Friendship fiction and heterosexual fiction.

High Bookshelf: Friendship fiction and gay fiction.

Fiction Recommendations and Nonfiction.

Extra Features.

Click on the links below in order to preview the contents of the e-book.

Main Bookshelf

Friendship fiction and heterosexual fiction.

The Three Lands

He vowed himself to his god. Now the god is growing impatient . . .

The Three Lands, a fantasy series on friendship, romance, and betrayal in times of war and peace.

Blood Vow.
Re-creation.
Bard of Pain.
Mystery.

Darkling Plain

Separated in time and place, a young woman and two young men are united in their goal: to protect those they care for from the destruction of battle. The odds are against them.

Darkling Plain, fantasy tales about young people in times of conflict.

This series also contains Princeling, a fantasy novel set in a world where war has lasted for generations, From Hell to the Stars, a loose translation of a medieval science fiction classic, and Main Stream, a sampling of suspenseful historical fantasy stories.

Crossing the Cliff.
Night Shadow.
Princeling 1: Noble.

Main Bookshelf Fiction Recommendations and Nonfiction

Selected sites.

High Bookshelf

Friendship fiction and gay fiction.

The Eternal Dungeon

In a cool, dark cavern, guarded by men and by oaths, lies a dungeon in which prisoners fearfully await the inevitable. The inevitable will be replaced by the unexpected.

The Eternal Dungeon, a historical fantasy series set in a land where the psychologists wield whips.

Rebirth 1: The Breaking.
[new] Rebirth 2: Love and Betrayal.
[new] Rebirth 3: First Time
[new] Rebirth 4: In Training.
[new] Rebirth 5: As a Seeker.
[new] Rebirth 6: Tops and Sops.
[new] Transformation 1: Deception.
[new] Transformation 2: Twists and Turns.
[new] Transformation 3: A Prisoner Has Need.
[new] Transformation 4: The Consultation.
[new] The Balance 1: Truth and Lies.
[new] The Balance 2: Barbarians.
[new] The Balance 3: Hidden.
[new] The Balance 4: Death Watch.
[new] The Unanswered Question.

Life Prison

They are imprisoned until death, and their lives cannot get worse . . . or so they think. But when an unlikely alliance forms against their captors, the reformers risk losing what little comforts they possess.

Life Prison, a historical fantasy series about male desire and determination in Victorian prisons.

Mercy's Prisoner 1: Life Prison.
Mercy's Prisoner 2: Coded Messages.
Hell's Messenger 1: Trial.
Hell's Messenger 2: Tour.

Michael's House

In a world where temples are dying and sacred theaters have been replaced by brothels, what will happen when a hard-headed businessman joins forces with an idealist?

Michael's House, a historical fantasy series set in an Edwardian slum.

Whipster 1: The New Boy.
Whipster 2: Offstage.
Whipster 3: Blurred Lines.

Prison City

What will happen when a youth from a bay island boarding school ends up in a futuristic prison?

Prison City, a historical fantasy series and retrofuture series based on the Chesapeake Bay oyster wars, boarding school rivalries in the 1910s, and 1960s visions of things to come.

Master and Servant 2: The True Master.
[new] Queue.

Master/Other

Masters come in many forms. Some don't even know they're masters.

Master/Other, gay fantasy and science fiction about prisoners, slaves, liegemen, and love.

This series also contains Leathermen, Plain Vanilla Straights, and Other Rebels, humor and satire about transgressive sexuality in the twenty-first century, and Unmasked, contemporary fiction about people who hide behind masks.

[new] Pleasure
Debt Price.
The Fool.
Eternally Divided.
O Most Unthankful.
Leather, Licking, and Lawnmowers 1: Clothesline.
Leather, Licking, and Lawnmowers 2: Spontaneous.
Leather, Licking, and Lawnmowers 3: Bad Habit.
Leather, Licking, and Lawnmowers 4: Leatherdar.
Leather, Licking, and Lawnmowers 5: Pinned.
What Slaves Do When They Aren't Cleaning Toilets.
The Slavefic Plot Creator.
A Sexual Minority Speaks Out.
Puppets.
Twenty Thousand Gold Stars.

Loren's Lashes

Leather is a world of rich pleasure palaces and endless sensual delights, where dreams can be pursued without limit, provided that a man has the strength to stand the test. . . . But in the rural town of Mayhill, population 32,000, leather life is a little different.

Loren's Lashes, a retro series about a Midwestern community of closeted leathermen.

[new] Edgeplay in Mayhill 1: Negotiations.
[new] Edgeplay in Mayhill 2: Preparations.
[new] Edgeplay in Mayhill 3: Scene.
First Lesson

For rights reasons, the fan fiction in the Subtext series is not available in this collection; however, the index page for that series is included.

Fiction Recommendations and Nonfiction

Ampersand History: Intersections Between History & Science & Art & Music & Literature & Religion & Philosophy.

Aslan's Kin: Interfaith Fantasy and Science Fiction.

The Boer War and Turn-of-the-Century Firearms: A Bibliography of Printed and Online Resources.

Booktrailer Links.

Buried Treasure: Recommendations of Online Male Homoerotic Stories and Male Friendship Stories (and anything else that catches my interest).

Essays by Dusk Peterson.

Gay and Lesbian Books in Alternative Formats.

GLBT Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature: A Web Directory.

Greenbelt Interfaith News.

Historical Fantasy: Links for Readers of Historical Fiction and Fantasy.

Hometown: Two Years in the Life of a Small Town Grown Large.

Homoerotic Historical Fiction Links.

International Directory of Online Leather Magazines and Newsletters.

International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day: A Directory of Online Creations.

Islanders and Watermen of the Chesapeake Bay: A Bibliography of Printed and Online Resources.

Leather Books in Alternative Formats.

Leather Culture, 1945-1985: A Bibliography of Printed and Online Resources.

Leather Fonds: Archives and Libraries with Collections Related to Leather Culture.

Leather TOCs: Tables of Contents for Leather Magazines.

Links on the History of Friendship, Romantic Friendship, Romance, and Sexuality.

A Little List of Links on Solitude, Simplicity, and Self-Discipline.

Male Romantic Friendships in Historical Photography and Literature.

Masculinity, Crime, and Everyday Life in Victorian and Edwardian Times: A Bibliography of Online and Printed Resources.

Online Resources for Blind and Partially Sighted Readers of Science Fiction and Fantasy.

Private Parlor: Online Male Homoerotic Fiction Recommendations by Guest Reviewers.

Retrofuture: Visions of the Future, 1945-1975.

Sites on the History and Literature of Western Hierarchical Relationships.

The Slash Skinny: Publishing News and Market Report on Original Slash.

Topman: Online Writings by and about John Preston.

Transcend: Leather Spirituality News and Links.

Extra Features

Series resources for The Three Lands, Loren's Lashes, and the Turn-of-the-Century Toughs cycle: The Eternal Dungeon, Life Prison, Michael's House, and Prison City.

Historical notes to historical fantasy stories.

Excerpts from upcoming fiction.

Cover art galleries.

Information on the author.

Excerpts from reviews.

Site map.

Unzipping instructions

A zipped file is simply a way of compressing a group of files so that they can be downloaded more quickly. In order to open Love in Dark Settings Omnibus, first download the zipped file to your hard drive. Go to the directory to which you downloaded the file. (In Windows, you can do this through My Computer or Windows Explorer.) Most recently manufactured computers will automatically unzip a zipped file if you double-click on the file name. If that doesn't work, you can try these unzipping programs.

Free: 7-Zip (Windows) or Unarchiver (Mac).

Popular: WinZip (Windows) or Stuffit (Mac).

How to open a zipped file in Windows without an unzipping program.

When you double-click on the zipped file, the unzipping program may automatically extract all of the files into a folder. If the unzipping program instead shows you a long list of files (00.htm, 01.htm, etc.), then select all of the files that the unzipping program shows. (You can select all the files by typing Control-A in Windows.) Extract the files into an empty folder.

Once the files are in the folder that either you or the unzipping program have chosen, the files will all appear in their proper order in that folder (the main folder). Go into the main folder and double-click on the contents.htm file in order to see the table of contents for Love in Dark Settings Omnibus.

Parental guidance note and disclaimer

Love in Dark Settings Omnibus contains fiction and nonfiction divided into the Main Bookshelf (aka duskdarkling.org, Suspenseful Friendship Fiction) and the High Bookshelf; parental supervision is strongly suggested for titles in the High Bookshelf. You can navigate directly to an index for only the Main Bookshelf titles through a link within the contents.htm file in the base directory of Love in Dark Settings Omnibus.

My recommendations of online writings at other sites date from 1999 to the present; I can't guarantee that all of the older links still work. However, I give hints in the introduction to the e-book on how readers can track down sites that have moved.

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This text, or a variation on it, was originally published at duskpeterson.com. Copyright © 2009-2011 Dusk Peterson. Some rights reserved. The text is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License (creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0). You may freely print, post, e-mail, share, or otherwise distribute the text for noncommercial purposes, provided that you include this paragraph. The author's policies on derivative works and fan works are available online (duskpeterson.com/copyright.htm).