"The Platinum Raven" by Rohan Quine is a triple convulsion whereby our heroine Raven escalates herself into the Chocolate Raven and then the Platinum Raven, from London to Dubai to the tower in the hills in the desert - then back down again, forever changed. The daydreams of the downtrodden Raven propel her into a fantasy life as a more glamorous version of herself: a party girl living in the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa. This latter’s imagination then spawns a yet more empowered and intense version of herself, as empress of a sequence of events whose fusion of extraordinary beauty, violence and sensuality is bewitching… A Distinguished Favorite in the NYC Big Book Award 2021.

In her cubicle high in the Shard in London, a sweet-natured, raven-haired receptionist named Raven is even more rudely mistreated than usual for a Monday morning. Recovering from this, her daydreams propel her into the fantasy life of a richer and more glamorous version of herself, who lives higher up in the world’s tallest skyscraper - the Burj Khalifa, in Dubai. Raven thinks of this woman as the Chocolate Raven, owing to her chocolate-coloured hair, which frames a face that’s just like her own; and straightaway, Raven cannot get enough of watching this glamorous creature.

The Chocolate Raven is a party girl whose lifestyle has a certain flash, albeit a certain flatness too. Standing on the vertiginous 152nd-Level terrace of the Burj Khalifa, she gazes across the desert at dusk, to the rock-slopes of the Hajar Mountains - and a mad-faced nightclub tower of shadow sprouts up, there on those slopes, from her gaze. This tower is run by a woman with a face just like the Chocolate Raven’s, but with platinum-blonde instead of chocolate-coloured hair, who lives a yet more empowered and intensely-coloured life: for she is the Platinum Raven, no less. And tonight she will preside over the launch of a revolutionary new club drug called mirror mist.

Between this uber-glamorous Platinum Raven and her companions Scorpio and Amber, there unfolds a sequence of events whose fusion of extraordinary beauty and violence and sensuality so bewitches the watching Chocolate Raven, that she is miserably desolate as soon as these events finish at dawn when the rising desert sun destroys that nocturnal tower on the rock-slopes. She therefore sets out on a mission to regain the voltage of the vanished building and the allure of its exotic denizens ... whereupon a stark piece of evidence of the Platinum Raven’s realm is channelled through the Chocolate Raven and is pulled right back down to earth in the original daydreamer Raven herself.

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"The Platinum Raven and other novellas" by Rohan Quine is a paperback comprising a collection of four novellas - "The Platinum Raven", "The Host in the Attic", "Apricot Eyes" and "Hallucination in Hong Kong" - each novella being also available by itself as an as an ebook. A Distinguished Favorite in the NYC Big Book Award 2021, these four novellas are literary fiction with a touch of magical realism and a dusting of horror, celebrating the darkest and brightest possibilities of human imagination, personality and language.

"The Platinum Raven" is a triple convulsion whereby our heroine Raven escalates herself into the Chocolate Raven and then the Platinum Raven, from London to Dubai to the tower in the hills in the desert - then back down again, forever changed. The daydreams of the downtrodden Raven propel her into a fantasy life as a more glamorous version of herself: a party girl living in the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa. This latter’s imagination then spawns a yet more empowered and intense version of herself, as empress of a sequence of events whose fusion of extraordinary beauty, violence and sensuality is bewitching... A Distinguished Favorite in the NYC Big Book Award 2021.

"The Host in the Attic" is a hologram of Oscar Wilde’s "The Picture of Dorian Gray", digitised and reframed in cinematic style, set in London’s Docklands in a few years’ time. High-flyer Jaymi discovers a secret novel online called "The Imagination Thief", written by a woman named Alaia; and they meet and fall in love. In his attic he hides the prototype of a new worldwide Web-browsing hologram, for whose appearance he was the model. While this hologram deteriorates into ever more terrifying corruption, Jaymi’s appearance remains forever sweet and youthful, despite his escalating evil ... until the inevitable reckoning unfolds. A Distinguished Favorite in the NYC Big Book Award 2021.

In "Apricot Eyes", a cat-and-mouse pursuit through the New York City night involves a preacher, a psychic and a dominatrix, broadcast live on air - until a horror is unearthed, bringing two of them together and the third to a sticky end. Beneath a waterfront waste ground in the Bronx, a monstrous population is being fattened up, by the preacher, for malign purposes. Jaymi and Scorpio are on his tracks, however, in a blast of fun that trumpets boldness, tolerance and voltage, celebrating the mystery and dangers furled just behind the surface of the everyday. A Distinguished Favorite in the NYC Big Book Award 2021.

In "Hallucination in Hong Kong", sliding from joy to nightmare and back, a plane-flight frames a journey into Jaymi’s and Angel’s polarised identities and perceptions, where past and present merge in an obsessive fantasy of love, death, horror and apocalyptic beauty. At take-off, warmed by the presence of his friend Angel beside him, Jaymi starts to doze, and enters a fog of horror in seeming to remember that their destination lies in their past, not ahead ... forcing him to explore those hellish possible events lying beneath the surface of our present and future, always ready to break through into reality. A Distinguished Favorite in the NYC Big Book Award 2021.

Rohan Quine, The Platinum Raven and other novellas, literary fiction, magical realism, dark fantasy, horror, gay, Dubai, Burj Khalifa, Hong Kong, New York, London, imagination, transgender, contemporary