From The Advocate Magazine:

"Clegg has spun a meticulously-researched and beautifully-written tale that is at once supremely romantic and tragic, yet somehow also a poignant, modern portrayal of sexual awakening, coming out, and being separate from the mainstream of society at a very young age..."

From Publisher's Weekly:

"Though usually portrayed as the worm in the bud that was Camelot, Mordred, the illegitimate offspring of King Arthur and sorceress Morgan le Fay, gets sympathetic treatment in Clegg's revisionist Arthurian fantasy...Born into exile on the Isle of Glass, the young Mordred knows his father only through the stories bitter elders tell of Arthur's theft of Excalibur from the Lady of the Lake. Mordred flourishes under the instruction of his mother and the wizard Merlin, but he's distracted from his education in druidic mysteries by his adolescent passion for a hermit living in the nearby wilds... refreshingly original..."

Booklist (Starred Review!)

"Clegg puts an inspired wrinkle in the hoary tale of Arthur and the grail by casting Arthur's kindred enemy, Mordred, as a gay man. An injured stranger in a cloak and odd, paganish mask, is captured and held in a monastery, igniting wild speculation among the locals, who believe him a notorious traitor. And so he is. He is Mordred, the bastard son of Arthur Pendragon and his half sister, the witch-queen Morgan Le Fay, and he now awaits trial for murder and treason...The tale he unfolds culminates in an unholy betrayal of his own magical talent by someone he loved and trusted all his life. This is the riveting first volume in a trilogy. How excellent."

Mordred, Bastard Son by Douglas Clegg

 

 

From the Publisher

 

Stoker Award-winning novelist Douglas Clegg (Afterlife, The Hour Before Dark, and over a dozen other best-selling novels of contemporary horror) sets his rich imagination to the task of reinventing Arthurian legend, and the results are spectacular.

 

A young monk becomes enthralled by the story a mysterious prisoner begins to tell as he tends to his wounds. The prisoner is Mordred, bastard son of King Arthur Pendragon and his half sister Morgan Le Fay, who has been arrested for murder and treason.

 

His story is one of ambition, power, and betrayal, and it will change the monk's life forever.

 

In Clegg's ambitious reimagining of Camelot, Mordred, the traditional villain of Arthurian legend, emerges as a heroic and romantic figure, torn between his powerful mother's desire for revenge against Arthur, his own conflicted feelings toward the father who betrayed him, and his passionate love affair with a knight from King Arthur's court.

 

The first of a trilogy, Mordred, Bastard Son sets the stage for an epic adventure of love, friendship, magic, war, and betrayal, a fresh, dazzling chapter in the Arthurian canon.