THE GENTLING BOX
By
Lisa Mannetti

The philosophies of the Age of Enlightenment create sweeping changes throughout 19th Century Europe, but to Hungary’s despised nomads, the gypsies, the world is still a dark and very dangerous landscape. Adversaries both mortal and supernatural lurk in the shadows, waiting to strike without mercy.

Imre, a half-gypsy horse trader, understands the danger to his small family all too well. Cursed with a hideously-disfiguring and fatal disease by the vengeful sorceress Anyeta, he watches those around him suffer and fall. Mimi, his wife, who is tricked into cutting off her own arm to create a powerful talisman. His friend Constantin, struck mute by Anyeta’s wrath. And Lenore, his and Mimi’s young daughter, who has been placed in the greatest jeopardy of all.

With his health deteriorating and death imminent, his wife possessed by the witch’s ghost and Lenore being groomed for a fate far worse than death, Imre turns to desperate measures—and a hellish memory from his childhood—to still the sorceress and end her reign of bloodshed. A presence even more powerful and terrifying to him than Anyeta: the gentling box.

THE GENTLING BOX is the terrifying debut novel of horror writer, Lisa Mannetti.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR 
Lisa Mannetti

Lisa Mannetti is a former magazine editor and adjunct college English instructor who discovered she preferred full-time writing to real work when she volunteered to be the family member who cared for her ailing mother. Her short story, "Hungry for the Flesh" (Space & Time, April 2007) was recommended for a Stoker Award. Additional short stories scheduled for publication in 2008 include "The Blow-Up Job" (TRAPS, Dark Hart Press) and "Other Rooms" (The Pretty-Scary Anthology, May 2008). Most recently she served as guest editor for Terrible Beauty, Fearful Symmetry, an anthology scheduled to be published by DarkHart Press in August 2008. She is currently working on a second novel, The Everest Hauntings.

When she isn’t writing, Lisa works on her virtual haunted inn website, The Chancery House and constructs macabre gothic greeting cards based on her cemetery photos. Visit:

www.thechanceryhouse.com

As a result of her extensive research about gypsies for The Gentling Box, she is also an expert Tarot reader.

Lisa lives in the house she grew up in Westchester County in New York with one highly rambunctious cat—Huckleberry Finn—and the Houdinis, Harry and Theo, two black kittens that are both charming and exasperating.

You can also visit Lisa’s author page at:

www.lisamannetti.com.