D'Spayr: A Knight in the Withered Land

by Joseph Armstead

In a decayed and dying alien world that was once center of a vast planetary empire, an embittered rogue knight, soldier to the fallen empire, traverses a bizarre landscape discovering strange and sinister truths about the nature of the leaders he once served and about the mysterious warlords who have now carved the world into their private kingdoms.

69 pages, ebook

Published July 18, 2014

About the author

Joseph Armstead (born February 2, 1956) is a horror/suspense/science fiction fiction author best known for his loosely-connected series of stories and novels about the MOON-CHOSEN vampires, and his THE WITHERED LAND dark fantasy/scifi series. Mr. Armstead's novels generally center on the themes of personal and societal alienation, xenophobia and interspecies racism, dark conspiracies, criminal violence and renegade scientific technologies. Armstead is also the creator of "The Infernals", evil alien demigods that he features in his "Book of Dark Memory" series, a horror-centric, darkly violent science fiction series, of which the novel Painmaker is the first volume.

Armstead's literary influences coincide with influences from modern cinema. He frequently imbues the violent scenes in his works with cinematic style. A practitioner of a literate style of writing verging on the poetic or the lyrical, he exhibits stylistic storytelling influences from the likes of Clive Barker, Stephen King, Brian Lumley and John Farris, with a nod or two to H.P. Lovecraft in his uses of mythical "cosmic conspiracies".

He currently lives in northern California and is a computer technologist. He is also known as a postmodernist freestyle poet and is frequently published in various literary publications.