As infamous as the tale of Peter Pan is, Captain Hook knows
it is not the truth. Cursed to be the villain in a sordid
game of war, all Hook wants is to be away from Pan and his
cruelty. However, no one can leave Neverland. Everything
changes when Stella Parrish, a grown woman, shows up without
Pan's knowing. As Hook tries to figure out what that means,
he finds himself feeling emotion he thought he didn't have
anymore. If he can learn to accept love and feel it once
more, he may find a way out of the scary Neverland.
ALIAS HOOK by Lisa Jensen takes hold of the Peter Pan story
you thought you knew and reimagines in a spectacular and
creative fashion. Hook is a character full of insecurities,
strengths, weaknesses, and a desperate need to grow up
himself. He is far from the simplicity of the original
villain, and you may just find yourself falling in love with
him just as Stella Parrish does.
The world building and the romance are completely astounding
in this novel. From the coy mermaids to the questionable
fairies to the warrior Indians, Jensen delivers rich detail
of every area of Neverland that will leave you breathless.
The feel and personalities of all the creatures are
perfectly fitting to the aurora Neverland has: a little
strange, a lot mysterious, and a whole lot of fascinating.
The romance between Stella and Hook is so real and touching
amid all the fantasy, and it's sure to warm readers' hearts.
For anyone looking to be immersed in a once-familiar world
with surprising mysteries, ALIAS HOOK is the perfect pick.
Lisa Jensen shows remarkable talent in this well-crafted
story, and I can't wait to see what she writes next.
"Every child knows how the story ends. The wicked pirate
captain is flung overboard, caught in the jaws of the
monster crocodile who drags him down to a watery grave. But
it was not yet my time to die. It's my fate to be trapped
here forever, in a nightmare of childhood fancy, with that
infernal, eternal boy."
Meet Captain James Benjamin
Hook, a witty, educated Restoration-era privateer cursed to
play villain to a pack of malicious little boys in a
pointless war that never ends. But everything changes when
Stella Parrish, a forbidden grown woman, dreams her way to
the Neverland in defiance of Pan’s rules. From the glamour
of the Fairy Revels, to the secret ceremonies of the First
Tribes, to the mysterious underwater temple beneath the
Mermaid Lagoon, the magical forces of the Neverland open up
for Stella as they never have for Hook. And in the pirate
captain himself, she begins to see someone far more complex
than the storybook villain.
With Stella’s knowledge
of folk and fairy tales, she might be Hook’s last chance for
redemption and release if they can break his curse before
Pan and his warrior boys hunt her down and drag Hook back to
their neverending game. Alias Hook by Lisa Jensen
is a beautifully and romantically written adult fairy
tale.
Excerpt
Him Or Me
Every child knows how the story ends. The wicked pirate
captain is flung overboard, caught in the jaws of the
monster crocodile, who drags him down to a watery grave. Who
could guess that below the water, the great beast would spew
me out with a belch and a wink of its horned, livid eye? It
was not yet my time to die, not then nor any other time.
It's my fate to be trapped forever in a nightmare of
childhood fancy with that infernal, eternal boy.
No one knows what came next, the part you never read about
in the stories. I clawed through water bloodied by the
corpses of my crew driven overboard to make a meal for the
sharks, flailed for the hull of my ship before the sharks
caught up to me.
I saw it all by moonrise as I hooked my way up the chains to
the deck. One of my men lay asprawl the hatch coaming, dead
eyes staring at the moon, curled fingers frozen over his
ruptured belly. Another had dragged himself a few paces
toward the rail before he expired, leaving a smear of fresh
blood on the deck that could never be stained red enough to
disguise it. Half a dozen others lay about in shadowy heaps,
limbs twisted, faces ghastly, silent as waxworks. Everything
stank of blood and decay. One man was draped face down over
the foredeck rail, arrows sprouting from his back. The
redskins were teaching the boys archery, as if they needed
any more advantage over us in battle. None of the dead were
boys.
Those who'd gone over the side screamed no more. Even the
monstrous ticking had subsided. My ship was as silent as the
tomb she had become. The boys had gone larking off again,
but not in my ship; not all of the fairies' black arts could
raise my Jolie Rouge out of her moldering berth in the bay.
Drumbeats from the island told me the Indians were
collecting their dead from our skirmish in the wood, but
none were left to mourn my men but me.
I started for the nearest body, to drag it to the ship's
boat, but as I passed the deckhouse, something groaned
within. The deckhouse. That's where he'd hidden to lure us
into his trap.
I shoved open the door, peered into the reeking gloom. Jukes
I recognized by the sprawl of his tattoos in the ghostly
moonlight. The Italian lay nearby, face frozen in an eternal
scream. I crept in across sticky planks toward a soft
grumble of pain, a sudden seizure of breath. My fingers
touched still-living flesh, and Jukes groaned again. There
was a new hieroglyph on his naked chest, thrust in with less
art than the rest, and still leaking red. I knelt in the
puddle, worked my hook arm round his back and propped him
up. Heavy as a corpse already, yet his head lolled back on
my arm and his dull eyes opened to look at me.
One. The boy had left me only one.
"Well, Bill." I could scarcely steady my voice.
"Sorry, Cap'n," he lisped through the blood in his mouth.
"He come at me in the dark."
"Don't talk," I cautioned, yet I was desperate for the
comfort of his voice. We'd sailed together since New
Providence; his pictographic skin was a living gallery of
our exploits from the Indies to the Gold Coast. He was the
closest thing I'd ever had to a friend in the pirate trade.
"Save your strength."
But it was already too late. We both knew it. The boy hadn't
even done it proper; life was escaping in an agonizing drip,
not a clean burst.
Jukes dragged another tortured breath out of his ruined
lungs. "Thought you was done for," he wheezed.
"Come, now, you know me better than that." I clenched my
teeth in assumed heartiness. "No mere boy is a match for
me."
A furtive smile glimmered briefly amid the blue and black
dots and calligraphic swirls on his face. I could see what
even so slight a movement cost him in misery. There was only
one way to help him now, could I but steel myself to do it.
"The women are warm in Hell, eh, Cap'n?" he prompted me.
"Save me a place at the Devil's mess," I answered by rote,
summoning every ounce of my resolve.
Red bubbled between his teeth. "Aye, aye—"
His eyes bulged for an instant, whites agleam in the
shadows, then the lids drooped in relief. "Thank'ee, Cap'n,"
wafted out on his last breath, as I extracted my knife from
between his ribs.
Gone, all of them gone now. Slaughtered one by one, like a
game. It's all a game to the boys.
I stretched Jukes out beside the twisted Italian, sat back
on my heels, forced my brain to think on practical matters.
Two or three trips in the gig it would take to see them all
properly consigned to deep water. The eerie, animal keening
of the loreleis singing to the moon rose up across the
water, cold and tormenting. I was the last human left alive
in the Bay of Neverland.
The Neverland, they call it, the infant paradise, the
puerile Eden where grown-ups dare not tread. They are wise
to fear it. But all children visit in their dreams. He finds
them by their longing, stray boys for his tribe and girls to
tell him stories.
They are not always English children, although he is partial
to London. They have erected a statue to him there. Fancy, a
public statue of Pan, the boy tyrant in his motley of
leaves, like a king or a hero. While Hook is reviled, the
evil pirate, the villain. There is no statue to me.
I've heard all the stories. I know the world thinks me not
only a simpering fop but a great coward, so affrighted by
the crocodile I would empty my bowels at the first sinister
tick of its clock. But it's the ticking itself I can't bear,
the tolling of the minutes, the very seconds, that I am
forced to spend in the Neverland for all eternity.
Elsewhere, time is passing in the normal way, but not here.
Not for me and the boy.
"It's Hook or me this time," the boy jeered as the massacre
began. But it's never him. And it's never me. Since then, he
has defeated me innumerable times, but never quite to the
death. He wills it so, and his will rules all. How often
have I felt my skin pierced, imagined in my wounded delirium
that Death has relented and come for me at last? Yet every
time, my blood stops leaking, my flesh knits. Sooner or
later, my eyes open again to yet another bleak new day, with
nothing to show for my pains but another scar on the
wreckage of my body.
Is it any wonder I so often tried to kill him? Would not his
death break the enchantment of this awful place and release
us both? But I can never best him. He flies. He has youth
and innocence on his side, and the heartlessness that comes
with them. I have only heartlessness, and it is never, ever
enough.
Outside the deckhouse, the night had gone dark. I crept out
again, still drenched in Bill Jukes' blood, and saw that the
moon itself, so full and white an hour before, had turned
red, as if she too were awash in blood. A red eclipse, as
mariners say, but never before had I seen the shadow of the
old world fall across the Neverland moon. Perhaps it was
only a trick of my fevered imagination, or some monstrous
reflection from the deck of the Rouge, yet it glared down on
me like a bloodshot eye, catching me out in all my crimes.
Once I thought I could never have enough of blood. It was
all that could satisfy me, for so long. But it wearies me
now, the tyranny of blood-lust, the serpent that feeds on
itself. The game that never changes. The game that never
ends.
"How long can you stay angry at the world?" she asked me
once. Why didn't I listen?
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