Beloved Gomorrah

After years of ‘professing’ at universities and writing for international literary journals, Justine Saracen began creating from the imagination and the heart. Trips to Egypt, Morocco and Palestine inspired the Ibis Prophecy books, which move from Ancient Egyptian theology to the bloodthirsty Christianity of the Crusades. The playful first novel, The 100th Generation, was a finalist in the Queerlit Competition and the Ann Bannon Reader’s Choice award. The sequel, 2007 Lammy nominated Vulture’s Kiss, focuses on the first crusade and vividly dramatizes the dangers of militant religion.

The expatriate Brussels-based writer, then moved her literary spotlight up a few centuries, to the Renaissance and a few kilometers to the north, to Rome. Sistine Heresy, conjures up an GLBT and thoroughly blasphemic backstory to Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel frescoes. The newly released work quickly sold out at the 2009 Palm Springs Lesbian Book Festival.

Mephisto Aria, in contrast, deals with devilish things, in a WWII thriller that has one eye on the Faust story and the other on the world of opera. In Berlin, staggering toward recovery after WWII, a Russian soldier passes on his brilliance, but also his mortal guilt, to his opera singer daughter.

Lest anyone think that Saracen is done confronting religion, her current work in progress is about a transvestite in Venice who meets the terrors of the Inquisition and finds out something important -- one might almost say appalling -- about God. Scanning a fictional eye along the centuries, Saracen has a self-declared mission, to repopulate history with “the likes of us,” by which she appears to mean people who, not by their acts, but by their very lives, still scare the ignorant.