Flesh and bone, or polished stone, life is but a dream; with the rising sun, sleepers awaken, leaving their dreams behind, as it always has been. However, what if those dreams were unable to end? What if something interrupted the wake-up call, or for that matter, who is to even say that when we fall asleep, we awaken as the same person, in the same time and place from which we left the night before? Going a step further, if you were to die in your dreams, which part of you ceases to exist from one world and time, while another awakens and flourishes somewhere else? Does then, the dream last forever? Is life truly but a dream? Twentieth-century Harley and fourteenth-century Anna have a problem; caught amongst their fantasies, they are unable to return from where they've fell asleep, as their worlds have collapsed. Far from being in "limbo," these two find new lives in each other, within the broken context of time. However, and as they'll soon learn, neither time, nor space and distance exist in these new lives. After all, sometimes what we know fails us, due to our romanticizing the past, or for that matter, the future. Memories then create splintering realities, far removed from daily life, and as we find ourselves unable (or unwilling) to wake up, our fantasies run wild, revealing our true nature. In this sexy, entirely 80s, genre-bending romantic adventure, passion, imagination and mystery abound, ensuring that this will be a dream that you'll never want to wake from, even if you could. Well, if you can manage to keep the big, black birds away, that is.Following in the high standards of the Stary Trilogy (Nadeyat'sya, Neizbezhnyy and Natsionalist), The Hell-Kites again nukes the proverbial fiction battlefield. A story of lust and love, both ridiculous and profound, dazzling and cheesy, the Hell-Kites serves as complex contrast; night and day, our world and the next, Skinamax and cold, howling winds across bitter landscape. It is achingly deep as it is air-headed, sexy and dumb. It is a place in which you never want to leave... or be able to. Total immersion. Total obsession. The firing of new memories from the old, round after round through the deepest parts of your instinctual, impulsive mind... and all the while, Sichok's characters are smiling back at you, either bouncing in your lap and nibbling your ear, or heartbroken, crying and needing held, later offering you a smoke in the back of a dark, neon-lit wonderland of an underground bar in 1984. Contrast. There really is nothing else out there like Sichok's works of fiction; the visuals, characters, settings, dialogue, huge TWISTS... his books will keep you up for the night, in new and better worlds, turned on and... crying. Be prepared to be a wreck at the end, though, that "just got hit by a truck" sensation, before you stop, turn the book over and begin reading.... AGAIN.By the way, his "Easter eggs" alone will drive you to passionately collect and study his works, which all some how interconnect, as we're starting to see from the first book outside of the Stary universe. Totally awesome!