The fabulous Aqueduct Press will be publishing my 135 page novella, The Rampant, as a stand alone paperback and ebook later this year!
What is the book about?
The Rampant is a queer-girls-in-love, coming-of-age short novel that involves a Sumerian Rapture in Southern Indiana. It’s also an intense narrative ride that is, by turns, harrowing, heartbreaking, and darkly funny.
Christianity it turns out got a whole lot of things wrong. It’s ten years since the hordes of old-world Sumerian gods, the Anunna and Anunnaki, arrived to kick off the end of the world. Massive tornadoes, tsunamis, government collapse: it all started out so strong, but the Rampant, the final herald of the apocalypse, failed to show. Both people and gods have had to adjust.
Sixteen-year-old friends Emelia Bareilles and Gillian Halkey have spent most of their childhood in a world filled with the echoes of lost friends, eviscerated family members, and dwindling hope. The world is an ugly broken place. Their only option is to travel to the Netherworld, collect the Rampant, and finally kick off the Rapture.
Riffing on fragments of historical text, including the Epic of Gilgamesh, The Rampant uses and refutes the known details and rules of the Sumerian underworld. As they travel through the lands of the dead, Emelia and Gillian meet loved ones and strangers trapped in a system they didn’t create. Each step makes them more determined to help create a better, godless world. In the end this is a story about the inequities of power, human self-determination, and the various ways in which we love each other.
What others are saying
“The Rampant was so much fun to read! Is that the right way to blurb a horror novel? I don’t know, but it’s the truth. Julie Day’s novel is smart, playful, sly and, yes, horrifying too. A short gem of a book.”
— Victor LaValle, author of The Changeling. Winner of the World Fantasy, Shirley Jackson, and British Fantasy awards.
“THE RAMPANT is one of the most original Apocalypse tales I’ve read in ages. Julie C. Day avoids cliché and gives the reader the end-times by way of Sumerian myth — except this particular end-of-the-world stalls when one of its principal players decides not to show up. What unfolds is a journey into the underworld filled with joy and horror, hope and loss. It’s a wise and lovely story — exactly what I’ve come to expect from Day.”
— Nathan Ballingrud, winner of the Shirley Jackson Award. Shortlisted for the World Fantasy, British Fantasy, and Bram Stoker Awards.
“I loved the epic journey of our two teenaged queer heroes, Gillian and Emelia, through the sprawling horrors of the Sumerian afterworld. The clash of their modern feminist sensibilities with the cruel and rigid theocracy of the very oldest gods out-weirds much of the New Weird. In The Rampant, Julie Day calls us to visit a fantastical landscape in a voice that is hers alone.”
— James Patrick Kelly, winner of the Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards.
“The girl-powered post-apocalyptic Sumerian underworld quest I didn’t know I needed.”
— Sarah Pinsker, winner of the Nebula and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award.
Interested in finding out more?
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