What Love Made Monstrous

Aphrodite gave him beauty. Life gave him hunger.

Weary of the horrors created by the gods, Aphrodite decides to make a beautiful beast. Iason enters the world with a perfect body, a curious mind, and no understanding of the need that will soon begin to consume him.

His creator does not understand it either.

Blood can sustain him only when it comes from someone he loves who loves him in return. The beloved need not know what he is. And when hunger overwhelms him, the very intimacy that keeps him alive becomes an opportunity for betrayal.

When Aphrodite falls in love with her creation, her blood gives him immortality. Her choices also bring the judgment of the gods-and consequences neither lover can escape.

Across centuries, Iason loves women and men, loses people he believed he could keep, and creates others who must live with what his blood has made them. Some changes happen by accident. Others are deliberate promises of forever. Each leaves someone with a life that no longer belongs entirely to the world they knew.

Then, in San Salvador, he meets Tomás Arce.

A painting restorer with an exacting eye and little patience for evasions, Tomás has work, family, and a history of love that began long before Iason arrived. Their attraction grows into a passionate shared life. Tomás knowingly permits him to feed, but insists that wanting more cannot become permission to take it.

Iason wants their life together to last. Yet the eternity he can offer carries a hunger Tomás must decide whether he could bear.

Spanning centuries of divine desire and mortal attachment, What Love Made Monstrous is an epic queer gothic love story about the people we long to keep-and the harm we can do while loving them.