The New Faith against the Old Gods. A curse that isn't meant to be survived.
A girl turned monster, turned myth — told in her own voice at last.
Author of Dark Folklore & Mythic Retellings

Jack Beddows

Two novels. Two worlds split against themselves.

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The Author

A reader first, before anything else.

Jack Beddows has spent his career around stories — as a reader, first and foremost, as a high school English teacher, and as a novelist. He is also a classically trained composer and songwriter, and the rhythms of that other art form run underneath his prose.

His fiction returns again and again to the same fault line: a girl caught between two worlds, two faiths, two versions of herself — and the moment she has to choose, or discovers she never really had a choice at all. Bava Yaga and The Last of the Gorgons are both, in their own way, stories about what a person becomes when the old gods refuse to let go.

Novelist Former English Teacher Composer & Songwriter
Bava Yaga book cover
Novel

Bava Yaga

A plain, overlooked girl in a village torn between the rising faith in Christ and the ways of the old gods discovers that a curse stalking her home isn't something to survive — it's something she's meant to become.

In the village of Cherasky, the other children called her Baba — grandmother — a cruel joke about her plain face, her unremarkable demeanor. But Bava is a sharp, watchful girl, who sees more than most.

For Bava is caught between her father's Christian faith and her mother's old pagan ways — two worlds that have never made peace, and certainly never will, now that the King of the Rus has ordered the conversion of his entire kingdom. When a village boy drowns in the river, and whispers of a curse follow the body out of the water like creeping fog, Bava becomes the one everyone watches. The one everyone blames. The one that hasn't chosen.

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The Last of the Gorgons book cover
Novel

The Last of the Gorgons

Before she was Medusa, she was only Eurayle — a girl who wanted nothing more than to escape her mother's shadow and become someone of her own choosing.

When her mother's ruin drives them from their home, a dying priestess of Aphrodite hands them a way out: a stolen name, a stolen title, a new life at the royal court of Seriphos. But the roles they inherit thrust Eurayle into a world of gods, princes, and appetites far crueler than poverty ever was.

And in her dreams, another life is waiting — one where she is no girl at all, but a warrior of the Amazons, hunting the monstrous Gorgons whose gaze meant death. The Last of the Gorgons is a story of the woman turned monster, turned myth — told, at last, in her own voice.

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