Irven DeVore writes that “Males are a breeding experiment run by females.”What if, in fact, women ran everything? What if women rejected the culture of rape and violence to take control of their lives in the safety of the Citadels? What if women could exist without males? Citadel is a metafictional, apocalyptic story braided into a contemporary post-lesbian novel built on genetics.
A few lines in the voice of Kaavi, an archeohistorian, and Trisha as she lives inside the novel:
“But men had been killing women forever…”
“In the beginning, just a few—the breeders, the confused ones, the male-identified ones, the ones who stayed, the ones with soft bones, suffered, but as the numbers grew and the conflicts increased in intensity there were more bodies and the Separation began as the blood flowed.”
Cover art by Jac Seery Howard; Technical guidance by M. Anne Sweet
Kaavi alone:
And on the 75th day of my journey, I stood on a hill overlooking a destroyed city of the plain burning in a hot afternoon sun. I saw the glinting of bones, the white shining of bones. A deep sadness overcame me. I knew this was the First Citadel. On my map, I tagged it, C-1. I marched off the hill, a day’s walk to the glinting until I came to rest at the edge of a huge killing field. I saw metal that had not decayed and chariots that had not yet rotted and sown in the ground were bones. In that field all terror, all fear of all time smothered the land like a choking cloud of desperation. Buried in the skull of the bodies were blades. Blades buried in the backs of fleeing bodies. So many. I worked the killing field for two days. I recalled the writings of the archaeohistorians who said that in the plains where the bloodshed was greatest, the soil turned fertile, the grasses grew tall and thick. In the chaos of bones and metal, I found the skeletons of men and horses. Here and there the residue of a wooden cross, the relic of a gold crescent, a double cross, a simple cross or a gold six-pointed star. Evidence that the Unification of the Dogmas was not a fiction. Though far in time from the killing, I imagined the thunder of war, the groans and the quaking of annihilation. In that field, as I stood over chaos, I recalled the sage’s saying, “There will be no freedom until the last priest strangles the last politician with the entrails of the last lawyer and then slits his own throat.”
I cried at the loss of paradise because in the killing our dreams had died.
Jack Remick 