Marla Mason Books
Meet Marla Mason—smart, saucy, slightly wicked witch of the East Coast. . . . Sorcerer Marla Mason, small-time guardian of the city of Felport, has a big problem. A rival is preparing a powerful spell that could end Marla’s life—and, even worse, wreck her city. Marla’s only chance of survival is to boost her powers with the Cornerstone, a magical artifact hidden somewhere in San Francisco. But when she arrives there, Marla finds that the quest isn’t going to be quite as cut-and-dried as she expected . . . and that some of the people she needs to talk to are dead. It seems that San Francisco’s top sorcerers are having troubles of their own—a mysterious assailant has the city’s magical community in a panic, and the local talent is being (gruesomely) picked off one by one. With her partner-in-crime, Rondeau, Marla is soon racing against time through San Francisco’s alien streets, dodging poisonous frogs, murderous hummingbirds, cannibals, and a nasty vibe from the local witchery, who suspect that Marla herself may be behind the recent murders. And if Marla doesn’t figure out who is killing the city’s finest in time, she’ll be in danger of becoming a magical statistic herself. . . .
The bad girl of the magical underworld is back and badder than ever Someone wants Marla Mason dead. Usually that’s not news. As chief sorcerer of Felport, someone always wants her dead. But this time she’s the target of a renegade assassin who specializes in killing his victims over days, months, or even years . Not to mention a mysterious knife-wielding killer in black who pops up in the most unexpected places. To make matters worse, an inmate has broken out of the Blackwing Institute for criminally insane sorcerers—a troubled psychic who can literally reweave the fabric of reality to match her own traumatic past. With her wisecracking partner Rondeau reluctantly in tow, Marla teams up with a “love-talker” whose dangerous erotic spells not even she can resist. Together they’re searching the rapidly transforming streets of Felport for a woman who’s become the Typhoid Mary of nightmares, infecting everything—and everyone—she touches with a chaos worse than death itself.
Death has come calling, and one woman has what he wants most of all... As chief sorcerer of Felport, Marla Mason thought she’d faced every kind of evil the magical world had to offer. But she’s never faced a killer like this. He’s dark, glib, handsome as the devil—and exactly who he says he is. Death— in the flesh . He’s arrived in Felport with a posse composed of a half-insane necromancer and the reanimated corpse of John Wilkes Booth, and he isn’t leaving until he gets what he came for. Only Marla is crazy enough to tell Death to go back to Hell. With the Founders’ Ball just around the bend, drawing together the brightest, meanest, and most dangerous of Felport’s magical elite, the last thing Marla needs is all-out war with the King of the Underworld, but that’s exactly what she’s got. As the battle lines are drawn, she can count on her hedonistic, body-hopping partner Rondeau…but how many of her old allies will stand by her side when facing the ultimate adversary? To save her city, Marla will have to find a way to cheat Death… literally.
Brain-eating fungi, wannabe sorcerers, long-lost relations–does even a hard-core witch stand a chance? Mad sorcerers, psychic vampires, an army of vengeful demons, Marla Mason would rather face them all than a flesh-and-blood ghost from her dysfunctional family past: her con artist brother, Jason. As Felport’s chief sorcerer, Marla would ordinarily consider it her duty to protect her town from such an unscrupulous ne’er-do-well. As his sister, things are a lot…trickier. Now, as Marla attempts to train an apprentice oracle whose magical wires have gotten crossed, Jason is setting up an elaborate sting and drawing her ever-so-corruptible partner Rondeau into the ruse. Their patsy is a filthy-rich wannabe mage and their bait is something so valuable, so dangerous, so sought after, it probably doesn’t exist. But now word’s gotten out that the Borrichius spores do exist and instead of a sucker Jason and Rondeau have a much bigger–and much deadlier–fish on their line: a reclusive sorcerer whose devotion to the mushroom god and command of vegetal magic could bring a fungal apocalypse to Felport. It’ll be the mother of all bad trips unless Marla can pull off the ultimate magical switcheroo…and somehow live to tell about it.
Sorcerer Marla Mason isn't particularly good at relaxing, so even in a beautiful resort hotel on the island of Maui, she can't help but go looking for trouble. When she meets a shark god whose powers were stolen, she offers to help him get it back -- but that's easier said than done. This story takes place directly after the events of the Marla Mason novel Broken Mirrors.
Sorcerer Marla Mason has never been afraid of a fight, but she's about to face her greatest challenge: herself. Or, at least, an alternate-universe version of herself, a woman who succumbed to the evil power of a cursed artifact and become a monstrous villain. Now this dark doppelganger is loose in Marla's world... and she has an agenda even more terrible than Marla can imagine.
Marla Mason, ousted chief sorcerer for the city of Felport, is languishing in exile on the island of Maui with her best friend, the psychic (and rather hedonistic) Rondeau. She's making a living of sorts as an occult detective, but for the most part, she's just marking time. Driven from the city she loves, Marla is adrift, nearly friendless, and stripped of almost all her power and resources. Obviously, it's the perfect time for old enemies to try and kill her. A group of sorcerers, all with their own reasons to want Marla dead, assemble and prepare to attack her while she's at her most vulnerable. The members of this Marla Mason Revenge Squad include the one-armed witch Nicolette, the cheerfully murderous psychopath Crapsey, a criminally insane shapeshifter, a man who hunts werewolves for fun, and a master of anti-magic, among others. But they aren't taking chances with an enemy as formidable as Marla. They hire the world's most notorious -- and deadly -- chaos witch, Elsie Jarrow, to lead their assault. But Elsie is impossible to predict and just as hard to control, and may well have an agenda of her own. Besides, Marla isn't as helpless as they think -- she's still got a few friends in high (and low) places, including a god or two. And no matter how bad her life is, there's nothing Marla loves more than a good fight. There's bound to be trouble in paradise....
Marla Mason, chief sorcerer of the coastal city of Felport, is called to the Blackwing Institute, a hospital for criminally insane magic-users. One of the patients tells her the world is going to end soon, when a great eldritch god rises from the ocean. Sure, there's a good chance the god is entirely imaginary... but that doesn't mean its cultists won't kill a lot of people trying to usher in its arrival. This story takes place between the events of the novels Blood Engines and Poison Sleep, and was originally published in The Solaris Book of New Fantasy (and later reprinted in the Year's Best Fantasy).
Bradley Bowman -- "B" to his friends -- was an up-and-coming Hollywood star when he began to be tormented by visions of impossible monsters. Now he lives a threadbare existence, unsure whether he's going insane or just witnessing the workings of a deeper world. When a desperate man asks for B's help to journey to the underworld to save his lost love, B agrees... but the ordeal becomes more personal than he expected. This is the first story featuring Bradley, who became a major character in Pratt's series of urban fantasy novels about sorcerer Marla Mason.
Marla Mason has faced a lot of tough adversaries in her years as chief sorcerer of Felport, but in this short story her city is menaced by a monster from the past: the legendary Beast of Felport, a creature that slaughtered the city's original settlers hundreds of years before, has returned. But the Beast isn't the only refugee from the past -- the city's first chief sorcerer, the ruthless Everett Malkin, has traveled through time as well. He's none too pleased with how Marla's running things... and Marla has never been too good at taking criticism.
Marla Mason has been a mercenary, chief sorcerer and protector of an entire city, and an occult detective, and now she's a goddess of Death... but only part-time. She gets to spend six months a year living as a mortal woman on Earth, and she's decided to devote those months to hunting monsters for fun and personal redemption. Armed with axe and dagger, with the living severed head of her worst enemy in a birdcage for a traveling companion, she sets off by motorcycle into the American Southwest on a journey of self-discovery and other-destruction. With cover art by Lindsey Look and interior illustrations by Zack Stella.
Part-time death goddess and full-time ass-kicking sorcerer Marla Mason awakens from a month in the underworld to find her best friends kidnapped, her worst enemy in charge of her home city, and a reality-devouring monster on the loose.
When a vile spirit awakens in the underworld, only sorcerer (and part-time death god) Marla Mason can save the underworld from devastation and regain her throne.
After a checkered career as a magical mercenary, ruler of a city, occult detective, freelance monster-hunter, and part-time demigod, Marla Mason has ascended fully to godhood, and now rules the underworld alone. Before she can retire to an eternity overseeing the afterlife, though, she has a couple of loose ends to tie up. An old associate has called in a favor, and wants Marla's help to defeat an alien infestation that could transform the world into an inhospitable wasteland. As if that's not bad enough, she has an equally daunting task: the divine ruler of the underworld is required to take a mortal consort, so while the world is in danger of ending, Marla has to go on dates to find someone she can stand to rule with side-by-side for millennia. After nine novels (and a prequel short novel) about sorcerer Marla Mason, it's time for the grand finale, the cherry on top, the finishing move, the last roundhouse kick to the face. Come see what's behind the last door.
Do Better gathers more than 20 stories set in the world of sorcerer/monster hunter/death god Marla Mason, heroine of the ten-book urban fantasy series that began with Blood Engines (2007) and concluded with Closing Doors (2017), including two pieces original to this collection: “Do Better,” about Marla’s hunt for an escaped demon (and some personal growth), and “The Four Horsepersons of the Eucatastrophe,” which sends Marla on a supernatural road trip with an amoral trickster god who wants to be her best friend. If you like trains to the underworld, inexplicably adorable hellhounds, snake gods, stylish cloaks that are actually malign parasitic entities from beyond the multiverse, anthropophagic monsters, abyssal squid, assassins who specialize in killing immortals, and impatient women who punch people who really deserve punching, this is the collection for you.