Dionysus in Wisconsin (Wisconsin Gothic, #1) / Wisconsin Gothic (ePub)

Shortlisted for the 2024 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Romance.

A graduate student and an archivist fight a god.

Fall, 1969. Ulysses Lenkov should be working on his dissertation. Instead, he's developing an unlucrative sideline in helping ghosts and hapless magic users. But when his clients start leaving town suddenly—or turning up dead—he starts to worry there's something afoot that's worse than an unavenged death or incipient insanity. His investigation begins with the last word on everyone's lips before they vanish: the mysterious Dionysus.

Sam Sterling is an archivist who recently moved back to Madison to be closer to the family he's not too sure he likes. But his peaceful days of teaching library students, creating finding aids, and community theater come to an end when the magnetic, mistrustful Ulysses turns up with a warning. There's a god coming, and it looks like it's coming for Sam.

Soon the two are helping each other through demon attacks, discovering the unsavory history of Sam's family, and racing to find a solution that doesn't lead to heartbreak and death. But as the year draws to a close, they'll face a deadly showdown as they try to save Sam—and the city itself.

Dionysus in Wisconsin is the first in a new series of urban fantasy/historical M/M romances set in Madison, WI in the late 1960s/early 1970s. It doesn't end on a cliffhanger and can be read as a stand-alone.