The Trickster’s Lover by Samantha MacLeod

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About the author:

Samantha’s work has been described as, “breathtakingly lyrical stories that breathe new and unexpected life into the old gods and the mortals who cross their paths.”</p>
<p>Born and raised in Colorado, Samantha MacLeod has lived in every time zone in the US, and London. She has a bachelor’s degree from Colby College and an M.A. from the University of Chicago; yes, the U. of C. really is where fun comes to die.</p>
<p>Samantha lives with her husband and two small children in the woods of southern Maine. When she’s not shoveling snow or writing steamy sex scenes, Samantha can be found teaching college composition and philosophy to undergraduates who have no idea she leads a double life as an erotica author.

What inspired you to write your book?

What did you want to be as a kid?</p>
<p>For me, the answer to that question was always a writer.</p>
<p>Even before I knew how to write, I’d fill entire sketchbooks with elaborate stories told in crayon stick figures.</p>
<p>So I graduated from college and jumped right on that author thing, right?</p>
<p>Not exactly.</p>
<p>From 2002 to 2015, I didn’t write anything more than a grocery list (or maybe a quick poem on the back of that grocery list).</p>
<p>Yup…I had thirteen years of writer’s block.</p>
<p>The problem wasn’t a lack of ideas. I’ve always had tons of crazy ideas. The problem was me. All my story ideas seemed to involve too much sex, or too much romance, or too many wildly implausible things like magic and other worlds.</p>
<p>They just weren’t Serious or Literary.</p>
<p>So I gave up.</p>
<p>Oddly enough, having kids pushed me back into the world of writing.</p>
<p>When my daughter turned four, she started to have opinions about what she wanted to do when she grew up. And it dawned on me that, someday, I’d have to tell her I had a dream once too, back when I was a kid.</p>
<p>But I gave it up when the going got tough.</p>
<p>So, once she started kindergarten, I decided to give this writing thing another whirl. Only this time, I ditched the Serious and the Literary.</p>
<p>And I decided to write the kind of book I’d like to read.</p>
<p>The result is my first novel, The Trickster’s Lover, a whirlwind romance between Norse god Loki and University of Chicago graduate student Caroline. It’s filled with sex, magic, other realms, and the end of the world.</p>
<p>I’m not claiming it’s either Serious or Literary.</p>
<p>But it was a heck of a lot of fun.

Here is a short sample from the book:

November in Chicago had been abysmal.<br />
The sun rose late and set early and, even when it was shining, the light came at an odd angle, always directly in my eyes. I knew Chicago would be cold, but the wind off Lake Michigan was violently so, pulling my breath away when I opened the heavy, oak doors of Swift Hall, slicing through my clothes when I walked home in full darkness at six in the evening. Even the University itself, with its soaring gothic spires and gargoyles, its dark wood paneling and stained glass windows, the University that felt like such an adventure in sunny September, was now dark and foreboding.<br />
I tried to focus on the life of the mind. I did. But the darkness bothered me, and the cold bothered me, and the curling, shriveling, brown leaves gusting and swirling around my feet bothered me. I felt like the entire world was dying.<br />
I kicked a pile of dead leaves out of my way as I walked into the long shadow of the library. The University’s library is an enormous, aggressively ugly concrete block, like a prison, built over what used to be the football field. It’s horribly out of place among the spires and gargoyles, and lately I’d begun to resent the entire building. I requested those books in September, for fuck’s sake, I thought, and they still haven’t arrived.<br />
A handful of shivering undergraduates stood around a card table outside the library doors, smelling of cigarette smoke and nominally selling a pile of sweatshirts that read, “The University of Chicago: Where Fun Comes to Die.” That’s not even funny, I thought. I pushed open the doors and walked to the Requests desk.<br />
“Yes?” The librarian gave me a stern look, although I’d been here every day for the past two months.<br />
“Any books for Caroline Capello?”<br />
She walked back to the metal shelves. “Oh yes,” she said, with brisk efficiency. “Three of them?”<br />
I smiled. November was finally looking up.<br />
When I was thirteen, I found a book of Norse mythology in the junior high library. I read it in one night, fascinated by stories of eight-legged horses and serpents circling the world, of Óðinn stealing the mead of poetry from the giants and Thor raining lighting on the trolls. When I returned the book to the library, I knew all the stories by heart.<br />
I brought home the rest of the library’s mythology books the next day and, in the weeks after that, I started going to the San Diego public library. Once I’d read everything I could find, I spent a summer teaching myself how to read German to open up a larger world of myths and legends.<br />
My brother told me I’d never have a boyfriend.<br />
“Geoff, don’t say that,” Mom would yell. It was one of the few things my older brother could do to irritate our mother. “Caroline is so beautiful, when she puts a little effort into it. She’ll have plenty of boyfriends to choose from!”<br />
As it turns out, neither of them were right. I never had a plethora of boys to choose from, but I did eventually manage to get one boyfriend before the end of college; Doug McInnes, the philosophy major from San Francisco.<br />
And right now, he was the only part of my life that wasn’t going according to my plans.<br />
I reached my dull, grey apartment building and hiked up five flights of stairs to my dull, grey studio apartment. The place was a disaster, as usual; dirty clothes on the floor, dishes stacked in the sink, a tangled ball of mildewing towels outside the bathroom door.<br />
Tomorrow, I told myself, I am totally going to clean this mess.<br />
I shoveled a few dishes off the cheap, fiberboard square that served as both kitchen table and desk, and I pulled the books carefully from my bag.<br />
The Wikings and Their Gods. Being a Recollection of the Pagan Beliefs of the Northmen. And the Sem Guði Hátíð, The God’s Feast. This was an account of a celebration held for the Norse gods in Svartalfheim, and it had never been translated into English.<br />
I was going to do it. I was going to be the first person to translate it.<br />
All I had to do was teach myself to read Icelandic.<br />
But first I pulled my phone out of my pocket. Doug answered on the fourth ring.“Hey,<br />
sweetie,” I said.<br />
“Oh, hi Carol,” he answered, somewhat less enthusiastically than I might have hoped. “So, my books came in today,” I told him.<br />
“Books?”<br />
“My books. That I requested the first week.”<br />
I could hear static crackling in my ear.<br />
“The God’s Feast,” I said. “You know, the Icelandic one.”<br />
“Oh, yeah. Well. That’s great.”<br />
The line hummed and buzzed. I decided to try a different tact.<br />
“So,” I said, dropping my voice to what I hoped was a low, sexy growl. “What are you<br />
wearing?”<br />
“Oh,” he said, and there was another pause. “Uh, this isn’t a great time, actually. I’ve got<br />
a lot of stuff to get through.”<br />
“I see.” Actually, it was a relief. Phone sex was not exactly working out for us.<br />
“Call you in the morning, ok,” he said.<br />
I hung up and glanced over my shoulder at the framed picture of the two of us, smiling at<br />
the beach. Handsome Doug, with his dark, wavy hair and dancing eyes, his arm draped around my shoulder.<br />
“The distance won’t matter,” I told him when I was packing for Chicago. “The important connection is here,” I said, my hands on his shoulders, standing on my toes to kiss his forehead.<br />
But it wasn’t working out that way, and I couldn’t understand what had gone wrong. Suddenly we had nothing to talk about; our conversations were filled with the hiss and buzz of static. When I could get him to answer his phone at all, that was.<br />
I turned away from the picture of Doug’s smiling face, all the way in California, and I looked at my books.<br />
I had work to do.<br />
The Sem Guði Hátíð was slow going as my two windows rattled in their panes and cold rain streaked across the glass. The lights flickered but stayed on; Chicago knew how to handle a storm. The only dictionary I’d managed to find translated ancient Icelandic into French, so I had a second dictionary to translate the French into English. Some of the dictionary entries were supremely unhelpful, offering that the translation for the French preposition “de” could be “of, to, from, by, with, than, at, off,” and, under some circumstances, “out of.”<br />
There were familiar characters in the Sem Guði Hátíð , like Óðinn, Thor, and Loki, but also plenty of ambiguity. Haf, for instance. According to my dictionary, this meant “ocean,” but was this the actual ocean? Was it the name of the god of the ocean? Or was it meant as a description, an attempt to evoke the vast size of the feast hall? Sometimes I was almost certain I’d understood a phrase, but mostly it was like feeling my way through an unfamiliar room with the lights turned off.<br />
It was fascinating.<br />
I had said I would only work until midnight. When midnight came I made another cup of tea and said I would only work until one in the morning. Now the clock above my tiny half-oven blinked quarter to two, and I ignored it.<br />
“Girnud,” I muttered to myself, trying out the words. I rolled them around on my tongue, imagining Viking ships and longhouses, imagining woodsmoke, the spray of salt from the ocean.<br />
“Girnud, löngun.”<br />
And then I was no longer alone in my apartment.<br />
There was, perhaps, a crackle of electricity in the air, a quick gust on the back of my neck, like a melting snowflake.<br />
I looked up from the table and saw him.<br />
I stood and stumbled backwards, bumping awkwardly against the wall. He towered above me. He wore strange clothes; they looked like leather, black with streaks of gold and red, an enormous cloak rippling behind him. He had pale skin and long, fiery red hair that fell to his shoulders. His ice-blue eyes seemed to be laughing.<br />
“Shhhhhh…” he whispered, bringing an elegant finger to his lips.<br />
I tore my eyes off him to glance at the door to my apartment. It was still closed, bolted, with the chain drawn.<br />
How did…?<br />
I turned back to him, and he moved a step closer. He bent towards me, so close our lips were almost touching. I could smell him: Woodsmoke. Salt spray. Cold, and leather. He’s broken into my apartment, I thought, but even as I formed the words I knew they weren’t exactly true.<br />
“Shhhhh….” he whispered in my ear, and I could feel his breath warm on my neck.<br />
My skin prickled, and I trembled as my body responded to his closeness, to his smell. I should be afraid, I thought. I should scream. I should not – I stared at his high cheekbones, his full lips. I really should not want to touch him.<br />
And then I recognized him.<br />
I’d been reading about him since I was thirteen.<br />
“Loki?” I swallowed, my voice sounding very small. “Loki… of the Ӕsir?”<br />
He turned his head and smiled at me, his blue eyes dancing. “Very good,” he said.<br />
Then he put his finger against his lips again. “Now, shhhh….”