Barak A. Bassman

The wizard Merlin plays a key role at the court of King Arthur in Logres-healer, seer, and wise counselor-but has always been an outsider, shunned for his physical ugliness and tenacious loyalty to the old pagan gods. Yet when the lovely Viviane firmly rejects his advances, he cannot let go of his longing and desire for her. In desperation, Merlin engages in increasingly self-destructive behavior in his attempts to possess Viviane, leading to his eventual downfall and murder.

The Death of the Wizard Merlin

On a late summer night in 18th century Poland, a Jewish wanderer enters a tavern in a small shtetl and tells a tale of his late master and teacher, Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer, the holy Baal Shem Tov. And not just any tale: This will be the tale of how the Baal Shem Tov once spent a long night in a remote forest hut with a lamed vovnik, one of the thirty-six hidden saints who, according to Jewish legend, sustain the world through their righteousness - even though outwardly they lead lives of bitter poverty and humble obscurity. Yet as the tale progresses, and the hidden saint reveals more of his past, it becomes apparent that darker forces are afoot. The Twisted Path of the Hidden Saint: An Occult Tale of the Baal Shem Tov is a dark, twisted story of evil and sorcery, and how the striving for goodness can be manipulated and perverted.

An Occult Tale of the Baal Shem Tov

The Twisted Path of the Hidden Saint

The Beheading Game 

Yehiel is a wealthy Jewish timber merchant in a shtetl in 18th century Poland, with a happy family at home, including a teenage daughter for whom he soon hopes to strike a fine marriage match. But then one night she suddenly refuses to eat and starts to cut and scratch at her own skin. Over the succeeding days and weeks, her behavior becomes ever more erratic and baffling. Terrified and confused at what could be happening to his beloved daughter, Yehiel desperately searches far and wide for answers until, at last, the famed kabbalistic master Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer, the Baal Shem Tov, comes to his aid. The Baal Shem Tov confronts the wandering spirit, the dybbuk, that has possessed her and performs a dramatic exorcism. But as Yehiel will learn, the exorcism was not the end of the spirit's entanglement with his daughter.

A Cruel Tale of Love and Exorcism

The Starvation Dybbuk

Dovid was a poor man down on his luck in a 17th century Polish Jewish world traumatized by the pogroms of the Cossack chieftain Chmielnicki and reeling from the tragedy of the false messiah Sabbatai Zevi. Eking out a meager existence reading psalms for the sick and recently deceased, his prospects were grim. But then a wealthy stranger comes to town and promises to change Dovid's luck if Dovid agrees to marry his future son to the stranger's future daughter. Dovid laughs and agrees. And soon enough his luck changes: Dovid becomes a wealthy man with a son who is a brilliant Talmudic prodigy. However, when the mysterious benefactor comes to claim his son as a bridegroom, Dovid slowly learns the horrible truth of what he has really done and desperately seeks atonement.

A Tale of Demons in Old Jewish Poland

Repentance

At the beginning of the First Crusade in the year 1096, bands of marauding Crusader knights attack and massacre Jewish communities across the Rhineland in Germany. Yet one of the victims, a wine merchant from Worms who had lost his wife and son, receives a second chance at life: a magical fairy named Melusine brings him back to life and offers him a way out of the travails of Jewish history. If Reuven will love and marry her, then she will make him a wealthy and powerful Christian lord with vast estates and heroic and bold warrior sons. In despair he agrees, but then learns over time that he cannot so easily abandon the tragedy that destroyed his community. In the end, he must choose between the pleasures of the fairy's magical gifts and the pull of searing memory.

The Gifts of the Fairy Melusine

A Tale of Perceval and the Grail

The Cruelty of the Fisher King

The Minotaur is one of the most fearsome monsters in the ancient Greek imagination: the half human, half bull child of Queen Pasiphae of Crete, who is locked away in a mysterious and treacherous maze, beneath the royal palace of Crete, called the Labyrinth. There he feasts on the flesh of the youths and virgins of Athens who are sacrificed to him until the great Athenian hero Theseus slays him. In Elegy of the Minotaur, the fearsome monster is reimagined as a shy, bookish, vegetarian loner who longs for human love and companionship. He falls hopelessly in love with a cold, vain beauty in the royal court of ancient Crete, who cruelly spurns his declaration of love. In despair, the monster makes a desperate pilgrimage to visit a holy shrine to beg reprieve from the gods from his cursed fate to become a handsome youth who can win his beloved's heart. The monster is forced to confront and accept his fate before being recaptured and imprisoned in the underground labyrinth, where he must face his final confrontation with the bloodthirsty and ruthless Theseus.

Elegy of the Minotaur

The Twilight of the Magical Siren is the tale of Judah, a young Jewish man, adrift, living during the Western Roman Empire in the fourth century CE, a time when a newly triumphant Christianity overcame and marginalized the cults of the old pagan gods. One evening Judah meets an ancient goddess abandoned by this newly Christianized Empire, a beautiful siren with a melancholy song. Judah becomes obsessed with the goddess. He alternately loves and hates her, but cannot break away. She will haunt and chase him, and ultimately drive him from a happy domestic life to the delights and terrors of her magical cavern in the heart of an enchanted mountain. Drawing motifs from the medieval Tannhauser myth, The Twilight of the Magical Siren explores the temptations and pitfalls of abandoning one's life for the hypnotic song of the pagan goddess.

A Tale of Late Antiquity

The Twilight of the Magical Siren

Sir Carados, a handsome and powerful young knight of King Arthur's court, has spent his life effortlessly progressing from triumph to triumph until the day he foolishly accepts a challenge from a mysterious giant who has barged into Camelot's Christmas celebration: to deliver an axe blow to the giant's head now and then meekly submit to the giant's return blow in exactly one year. But when Carados watches the decapitated giant stand back up after being struck with an axe and mount its severed head back on its body, he knows he is doomed to die in a year's time and must undergo a series of adventures to test whether he will have the strength and courage to keep his oath to submit to the reciprocal blow. But unlike Sir Gawain in the famous poem about his encounter with the Green Knight, it is far from clear that Carados will maintain his honor and resist the temptation to flee from his impending fate. As he struggles with the sudden futility of his soon to be cut short life, Carados slides into greater depths of violence and cruelty.

The Beheading Game

Drawing upon ancient and medieval Jewish legends about the perils of trying to force the dawn of the Messianic Age, The Last Confession of Joseph della Reina tells the story of a dreamy, idealistic young Jewish man in medieval Spain who becomes convinced that, as recounted in the Talmud, the Messiah lies waiting among the beggars at the gates of Rome. Horrified by the world's suffering, Joseph decides to launch a quest to Italy to confront the Messiah in person and to force him to commence the redemption of the world, so that there will be no more death and disease. But when he finally meets the Messiah, he learns that there is a terrible price to be paid to try to force the end of history and the redemption of humanity and he must decide how far the means can justify the ends.

Barak A. Bassman

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