The Stanton Chronicles: Historical Fiction infused with Mystery and the Paranormal

 

The Stanton Chronicles combines history, mystery and the paranormal to weave a fact-based fantasy of Global Empire and the multinational corporations and secret organizations that have ruled it from time immemorial.

What has become The Stanton Chronicles began in 2003 as a series of blog posts on a literary website called Legion, written by Planner Forthright, the Angel Falling Upwards. A post-postmodern take on the world (past, present, and future) by an immortal who participated in War in Heaven that led to the Fall as one of Lucifer's lieutenants (a war he chose to fight because God had taken an egalitarian system of Light Beings and turned them into a Hierarchy after discovering the secret of splitting atoms), the blog went through various iterations and names before the entries were published in book form in 2012 by Burning Bulb Publishing as Minor Confessions of an Angel Falling Upward.

The contents have always been controversial, prompting Legion to once say, "We will continue to publish this wild work until the FBI bust down the door and stop us!" and more than one publisher, after consulting with their lawyers and staff, regretfully declining.

In the future, I will write a blog about some of the inspirations and share some of Planner's philosophies.

Planner, a rebel who disavows Heaven and Hell, has been trapped into working for Parvus Cornu, the Little Horn of Revelation, to usher in Armageddon. He is determined to do it his way... and perhaps not at all.

The five books called The Cannon and the Quill (seven total are planned) center on the Golden Age of Piracy, 1715-1725) and the major players among the pirates, world governments, and the Catholic Church.

It was in this series that I introduced the pursuit of the Twelve Ancient Objects that have been at the center of every major conflict in history. 

The two factions that are in constant pursuit (and in possession of most) of the Twelve Ancient Objects are:

The Ravenskalds, who rose to power in the 1100s (and who run a megacorporation, the Ravenskald Group, in "the not too distant Present" as I term it) and are the creators of Storm Haven, created in the aftermath of Superstorm Loki out of a section of the New Jersey Shore. Storm Haven is a prototypical Surveillance State--the first of a planned 23 in America, each with their own state of the art nuclear power plant.

Storm Haven is the location of Ravenskald Tower, RTG's international headquarters.

The current head of RTG is Solomon Ravenskald, assisted by an immortal who currently goes by the name of Xavier Hearst, who is the actually the djinn Iblis, controlled by the ring of Solomon from the time of the building of the ancient Temple.

The nemesis of both RTG and Xavier Hearst is The Star Quorum, which has seven members. 

The first Star Quorum was held in 1209 at the old Papal Basilica of Saint Peter, comprising Cardinals, alchemists, soldiers, and scholars:

Legend had it that St. Grotth himself had attended this initial meeting, having selected, with the blessing of Pope Innocent the Third, a trio Cardinals—Giovanni di San Paolo, Gregorio Carelli, and Guido de Papa (a practice that continued to the present). 

Filling out the seven seats were the Albigensian crusaders Simon de Montfort, 5th Earl of Leicester and Geoffrey I of Villehardouin, as well as the chronicler Roger of Wendover and the priest Simon Langton, brother of the Archbishop of Canterbury. 

Simon de Montfort was replaced after his June 25, 1218 death at the Siege of Toulouse and was replaced by Alan de St. Clair, Baron of Carfrae.

There are always three Cardinals.

The current Star Quorum:

Cardinal Alfonso Duarte Costa, Portuguese head of the Archivio Apostolico Vaticano (he ordered the Chinon Parchment released from the AAV and published in 2007)

Cardinal Andre Louis Guvot, who oversaw the Vatican education institution known as the Pontifical Athenaeum Regina Apostolorum. 

Cardinal Giuseppe Mauro, grand master of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre and head of its church, St. D’Onofrio al Gianicolo at the Palazzo della Rovere in Rome—where the pope had ordered it moved to from Jerusalem in 1948. (replaced Cardinal Archbishop of New York, Esteban Claudio Rojas. 

Grand Master of the Knights of Malta, Ramón Sebastiano Rocafull. Magistral Palace on the Via dei Condotti, which had been the seat of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta since 1834. Commander of the Scarlet Shrouded Knights of Saint Grotth.

Gregory Garvin, Superior General of the Society of Jesus

Eleanora Sinclair, matriarch of the various international strands of the Knights Templar; 

Israeli-Palestinian Julius Eccobukk, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations for the United States

The Star Quorum is assisted by another Immortal, whose true origins are still unknown.

The Cannon and the Quill books have sections that take place "in the not too distant Present" and feature the Domestic Threat Early Assessment Unit (DTEAU) of the FBI and Uriel and Michael Stanton, twins from a family pitted against the Ravenskalds for nearly a millennium.

Planner Forthright makes appearances in some of the Cannon and the Quill Books.

The DTEAU and other modern characters are also featured in the short story anthology The Icarus Continuum.

Three Gothic Doctors and Their Sons (the subject of a near future blog) asks the question: "What if a single ambitious scientist had the journals of Frankenstein, Moreau, and Jekyll.

Sherlock Holmes and the Mystery of M is an homage to the tales of Arthur Conan Doyle with a different take on the relationship between Holmes and Watson. It is a supernatural tale of a shapeshifter terrorizing the powerful in London. 

Like three of Doyle's four novellas, it has an extended backstory section. It is a Gothic Western that presents a backstory for Quincy P. Morris, the Texan from Dracula, while also hinting at the events related in Bram Stoker's book. Jack Seward, Van Helsing, and Lucy Westerna are also introduced).

Both of these books are narrated by Judah Philemon Stanton, an ancestor of the modern Stanton brothers. He works for WT Stead at the Evening Standard. 

A third book is in the works, which is a prequel to both. It is about the Jack the Ripper murders and offers a unique solution to the age-old quest to identify the killer. 

All nine of these books are available on Amazon in several formats.