For most of the previous century forces loyal to the death-gods of Lathakra, King Cold and his triplet sister, the Scarlet Empress, have sought to replace the Head's reigning sense of hopelessness with another Golden Age, that of their own. Equally godlike devils such as the Unity of Chaos support them.

"Mired in scandal after his parents' mysterious deaths, the notorious Lord Jarret Sharpe agrees to run the family brewery for a year if his Machiavellian grandmother rescinds her ultimatum that he marry or lose his inheritance. But the gambler in him can't resist when beguiling Annabel Lake proposes a wager: If she wins their card game, he must help save her family's foundering brewery. But if he wins, she must spend a night in his bed. The outcome sets off a chain of events that threatens to destroy all of Jarret's plans and unveil the secret Annabel has held for so long. When Jarret discovers the darker reason behind her wager, he forces her into another one--and this time he intends to win not just her body, but also her heart."--Provided by publisher.

In the third volume in the Thrice-Cursed Godly Glories series, Nergal Vetala, the Blood Queen of Hadd, the Land of the Ambulatory Dead, is the lone devic vampire. For 35 years she has been unable to prevent the encroachment of the living on her realm. Then her soldier falls out of the sky and she's back in the pink againNas in arterial. But that's hardly enough for her.

Some 65 decades after claiming credit for abolishing the Death's Head Hellion and more than 50 decades after finally realizing their long-held dream of Panharmonium, Thrygragos Everyman and the Unities of Chaos, Order, and Balance, are horrified to learn that the plagues and poxes ravaging the Inner Earth are far from natural. They're deliberate attempts to end its days.

Contagion Collectors aimed to destroy the Inner Earth's Shining Ones, their devil-gods, by killing off those who would worship them - virtually everyone alive beneath the Cathonic Dome that enclosed the Hidden Continent of Sedon's Head. Thrygragos Everyman and his firstborn Unities thought them sorted when they stormed the Hoodoo Hamlet in 5476 as the four fearsome Horsemen of the Apocalypse. And so they had ... except, it wasn't just the bringers who needed sorting. It was the poxes and plagues they brought. The Hidden Headworld needed purging. There could be no doubt of that. Yet the Moloch Sedon had disappeared from the night's sky years earlier and evinced no signs of returning. Everyone knew what needed to be done yet no one, especially not Thrygragos Everyman, the Lord Laziest of Great Gods, was willing to command the purge begun. Then someone, ostensibly in the name of love, played a Trigregos Gambit. The Head lost its Balance, capitalized and female. Her brother Unities, Order and Chaos, regarded each other balefully. No longer restrained, a continental catastrophe of unprecedented proportions ensued. With calamitous rapidity, nearly 500 years of Panharmonium gave way to seemingly endless despair. The Inner Earth's populace lost faith in its devil-gods as by far the mightiest of them went at each other unrelentingly, unmindful of those they trampled beneath their gargantuan feet. The Dead didn't stay dead, though. They rose, disbelievers no longer. They battled on, their newly puissant goddess to exalt the higher. Came All-Death Day there were more Dead Things marching than Living Beings breathing. Fecundity no longer, the Vampire Queen of the Dead looked to rule the world - both sides of it!

In 2009 Phantacea Publications released “The War of the Apocalyptics”, the opening entry in the ‘Launch 1980’ story cycle. At its centre stood the same stirring saga of extraterrestrial Shining Ones and the doomed but unyielding Damnation Brigade as that related in “Phantacea Revisited 1: The Damnation Brigade”. That 2013 graphic novel gleaned material from the pages of Phantacea 1-5 (1977-1980) as well as Phantacea Phase One (mid-1980s). Its novelization’s until then untold Outer Earth sequences introduced or re-introduced a number of fascinating protagonists; ones who appeared or would have appeared in the comic book series had it continued. With a breathtaking cover by Ian Bateson, “Nuclear Dragons” turns the spotlight back on many of them. Given what’s coming, though, if they’re on Centauri Island days after the launching of the Cosmic Express, will any of them last long enough to return for a third entry in the ‘Launch 1980’ story cycle? No matter. Jim McPherson’s Phantacea Mythos is as full of incredible individuals as it is of astonishing challenges for them, and/or others, to survive.