by Johnny Strife

Being the First Part of the Passion Plaything Trilogy

Pink Crucifix is a darkly comic romance with horror and fantasy elements. The story of courtship between a vampire and her thrall endeavors to be analogous to that of a young man’s awkward attempts to maintain a relationship with an emotionally distant, much older, much more powerful woman. The story spans one night, but stretches back ninety years into the past, through the recollections of various characters. Ian Raith is an American soldier stationed in the medieval Bavarian town of Bamberg. Since his unit is scheduled to deploy to Afghanistan soon, he and his friend and subordinate, Nikolas Skandalis, take advantage of an Easter training holiday to abscond to the Netherlands. There, they score a large quantity of “Pink Crucifix” ecstasy from the Bosnian drug dealer Omar Amsterdam, in the hopes of selling it to their buddies downrange at a vastly inflated price. While sampling the pills in the Red Light District that night, Ian encounters a lovely German girl named Lorelei Böse, who appears to be surrounded by a glowing red aura. Enchanted and besotted, he follows her into the darkness, and quickly descends into a maelstrom of death and destruction, in which everything he has is taken from him. But Ian might discover that sometimes, one must lose everything in order to find the one thing that matters.