Shalat
Authored by: Mark Nemglan
Published by: Nemglan Press
Shalat is the unholy offspring of Mörk Borg, Knightfall, Tales from a Thousand and One Nights, and the Ars Goetia. A pitch-black epic medieval occult fantasy; a genre-defying descent into blood, war and magick.
Although primarily a work of fiction – a compulsively readable page-turner – it contains many layers of symbolism. The novel weaves a new mythos, drawing on traditions of Kabbalah and Islamic occultism, Goetia, Luciferianism and Dark Gnosticism. Full of scholarship and visionary insights, it is also an initiatory journey. For those who wish to seek a deeper meaning to the narrative, each of the 78 chapters is assigned a corresponding tarot card.
Shalat deals with themes of mastery and servitude; personal sacrifice; the desire for freedom and control through power; the generational legacy of pacts; the gnostic impulse; the web of fate; the tides of creation and destruction, and the exchange of influences between the worlds.
An incomparable mix of highbrow and lowbrow, sacred and profane, esoteric and exoteric, Shalat is epic blackened medieval occult fiction at its very best.
The Age of the Crusades is in its death-throes. The Frankish military orders – the warrior-monks of the Templar, Teutonic and Hospitaller Knights – cling to Christendom’s last bulwark against the armies of Islam: the city of Acre. They await the arrival of their nemesis, the Mameluk Sultan Al-Ashraf and his unassailable horde of 100,000 men.
In response, a new and clandestine fraternity puts into motion its Great Plan: to seek and unshackle a being interred deep in the Judean desert; a fell and blasphemous creature as old as the Earth and more potent than anything that lives upon it. Yet their covenant with the benighted Black Pope and his formidable retinue is fragile. While this Patriarch professes a union of common purpose – to bind the creature to their will as a weapon against the Turks – his real motives are veiled and inscrutable.
Caught between the armies of the Muslim Turks, the Black Pope, and the occult order of Frankish knights, a rag-tag brotherhood of damaged men rides towards its doom: a disgraced Templar knight, a haunted Nizari Hashashin, a mute Spanish hermit and a Jewish mystic. Only as their enemies draw close do they begin to understand their otherworldly purpose amidst the bitter and brutal crucible of war.
Meanwhile, the witch-queen known as Elath Arba observes all from her eyrie upon the summit of Mount Hermon. Yet as the intricate web of destiny unfolds, even she cannot determine its outcome, despite her best efforts. All will come together for a terrible reckoning but, at the very end of things, only one of them will comprehend the extent of the Powers at work, and the nature of their True Master.
Bibliography
Damnati Edition
Original Price: £27.95
Number of Copies Printed: 23 hand-numbered copies.
Contributors
Illustrators: Arik Roper, Benjamin A. Vierling, David V. D’Andrea, and Joshua Andrew Belanger.
Physical Description
Page Count: 408 black and white pages.
Illustrative Content: 4 exclusive art prints by the illustrators.
Binding
Binding: Hardbound in black book cloth with crimson hand-foiled front cover and spine, red and black headbands, black endpapers, with a red ribbon.
Paper: 90gsm cream book-wove.
Content Note
Other: Signed by the author.
