Novels & Short Stories
Ian Charles Lepine's prose works comprise four historical novels and as many short story anthologies. In his narrative writing, he explores the relationship between the past and the present, the self, and the other, and the various contradictions at the heart of man.
His historical novels engage in innovative ways relating to both form and content with the literary tradition of the centuries in which they are set, such as Rose of Darkness, which replicates Renaissance theatre prompt techniques, or L'Amour en Marbre, that seeks to reproduce newspaper articles from 19th- century Paris.
Novels
The Picture of Selene
How deep does a painting go? And can an infinity of perspective hold within its frame boundless horizons? One thing is for sure, there are more things in Heaven and Earth that are dreamt of in our philosophy; one thing is not for certain: does art obey the rules of reality? Also available in Spanish
Rose of Darkness
Eclipses, wolves, pyres, fires, betrayal, betrayal, betrayal. Rose of Darkness narrates the story of two friends, Henry of Lancaster and Henry of York who, after proving that there is nothing they will not do for one another, fall in love with the same woman, a dancer in the court of Henry VIII. Also available in Spanish
L'Amour en Marbre
An unanswered question and an unfinished statue haunt Hadrien Marbreu for five years. One day Inspector Leblanc calls him into the morgue where a thin hospital sheet is all that keeps him from the terrible knowledge of what happened to his wife, Iphigénie Blanche.
The Arabian Nightmares
Unintended consequences are the threads with which Allah weaves the tapestry of our lives. But is it indeed a tapestry or a pall that He creates? During the reign of the caliph Harun Al-Rashid, three men thrown into the same Egyptian prison tell each other their stories in a contest to determine who is the most miserable of them all. Unbeknownst to each of them, their fellow inmates were at the root of their tragedies.
Short Story Collections
Ars Aeterna
A collection of fourteen short (science) fictions, Ars Aeterna breaks the mould by placing its primary focus on the past. How will our relationship to art change in a future with new technologies, when even kindles become archaic artefacts? What will happen to Homer and the legacy of the Greeks? Will The Voyager and all those screams we often send off into The Void ever find a destination?
The Mountain Mists
A collection of metaphysical and fantastic tales sculpted around the Greco-Roman past, The Mountain Mists presents a world of oblivion and memory, a universe of timeless time, of split and splintered selves, of passions of marble and labyrinths, and philosophical nightmares.
The Gate of Orient
The deserts of Arabia are like an immense hourglass, but unlike their more mundane brethren, they are capable of creating sandstorms that destroy the very concept of time as we know it. It is during one of these tempests of time that Halim Cooper, a sergeant in the US army, finds a doorway in the middle of the eternal dunes that takes him to a place of utter wonder and terrible magic. A collection of short stories with an ingenious and infernal framing apparatus, The Gate of Orient brings to the present the old enchantment of the Arabian Nights.
Tempus Punit
At the heart of all punishment, of all torture, lies Time; yet it is Time that beats at the heart of all deliverance. Tempus Punit, Tempus Liberat is a collection of suffering in prose. Written at a time of immense emotional distress, these tales propose a confrontation against the human, the self, and the other.