Works by
Justine Saracen
(Writer)

Fiction

Ibis Prophecy Series
Follows the adventures of a lesbian archeologist through the travails of modern, medieval, and ancient Egypt.

1. The 100th Generation (2006) -- Nominated 2006 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Debut Fiction; Finalist in the Queerlit 2005 contest
   Archeologist Valerie Foret has spent a fruitless year searching for a tomb in the desert, a year broken only by the intermittent dalliance with a high-ranking Egyptian woman. When she finally uncovers something, it is beyond her science and threatens to destroy her career. What she has found is also a threat to western religion, she discovers, as she is immediately set upon by fundamentalists of all faiths.

   Strange dark women keep appearing to protect her and what they are protecting her from, she slowly grasps, is God Himself. A mysterious Bedouin woman, who seems to offer both passion and enlightenment, delivers the final betrayal, sending her to her death.

   Or is it salvation? In the underworld, face to face with the god who has set the events in motion, Valerie must decide which. For the Egyptian nature gods are coming back to confront The Almighty and Valerie must choose sides.

   Against the backdrop of a polluted world rumbling with wars, Valerie witnesses the blazing spectacle of the animal deities, and makes her choice.

2. Vulture's Kiss (2007 release)
   The Prophecy of the Ibis god – of the Balance, and the Book, and the Bearing of the Child -- has been fulfilled, but that, it turns out, was the easy part.

   Seth and the Almighty Aton will not step aside so lightly as the gods of nature send their own holy family into the world. The family, alas, is all too mortal, as is the otherworldly Ka, and the Book, though written, is not read.

   There are pitfalls and assassins along the way, Christian, Jewish, and Muslim fundamentalists who threaten the family and the peace, and Valerie needs all the allies she can get. Allies and love. She looks both to a tough Iraqi journalist and to the mysterious Vulture goddess herself, though it is the goddess, who with every kiss, makes the matter worse. Passion, as it turns out means both ecstasy and suffering.

   For Valerie learns that she is part of a twisted lineage, one with a troubled relationship to all forms of god throughout the centuries. She has ancestors whose blood soaked the ground on both sides of the Crusades and as a scientist, she is the last person to argue on behalf of animal-headed divinities.

   Clearly the One God has not done well by the world, but are the many gods any better? What does an ancient animistic religion have to offer to the modern scientific world? In the holy places of Jerusalem, Valerie seems to find an answer, and it is not anything the world would ever have expected.

• Salvation in the Secular: The Moral Law in Thomas Mann's "Joseph Und Seine Brueder" (1976)
  Addresses themes that persisted into her later fiction -- the role of religion in history, the leitmotifs of fanaticism, and the power of language.