The Hornet’s Spell
What transformations must we undergo to experience love fully?
Danni is twenty-six, fed up with dating and defeated by the power she perceives men wield over her. Still, she longs for true and abiding love, and so on the advice of a friend she seeks out the services of Raj, a hypnotist.
Raj weighs Danni’s predicament, then leads her into a spell. As he does, a strange humming accompanies his words. An extraordinary, winged creature—a hornet queen—has joined them, he tells her, and with the queen comes hope.
With the hornet’s help, Raj guides Danni into a series of spells: through unexpected inner landscapes where she faces off with a monster and a troubling incarnation of her teenage self. Gradually, she recognizes that Raj is more integral to her quest than she’d imagined—and the queen more potent—and together they soar toward an astonishing future in an unseen world.
With a flair for the uncanny, The Hornet’s Spell offers an erotic and philosophical imagining of our potential for romantic fulfillment.
About The Hornet’s Spell
Q: The protagonist, Danni, has a problem and she’s seeking help. Do you think her problem is widespread?
RS: My daughters are young adults now, and the reports from them are bleak. We are in a Nietzschean moment, in which concerns about power predominate. Between online dating, social networks, porn, feminism, sexism, incels, gender fluidity, and the passion to rethink every norm of pre-nuptial behavior, the basic need—to declare a truce and give love a chance—has been left for dead.
Q: And that’s a mistake.
RS: The question is: what does it take for people to be happy and fulfilled? Re-fashioning ourselves is wonderfully creative, but there is an element of blindness and arrogance that comes with self-determination. Ignoring the design can be dangerous.
My third-grade teacher was an FDR liberal, a wonderful woman who believed, as many did back then, in the great blessing of civil engineering. She brought her Martin to class and taught us Woody Guthrie songs that celebrated the refashioning of the earth for the good of mankind: building bridges, moving coastlines, generating power by damming rivers. Two decades later, everything had changed. People had become conscious of the “environment,” an awareness founded on the insight that the earth had its own design, and the human race couldn’t ignore that.
I think we’ll go through the same process with gender, partnering, love and family. There’s a design that has nothing to do with modern social needs. Right now we’re choosing to ignore the design, in favor of testing the limits of creativity. At some point there will be a retrenchment. We’ll realize that we can’t change the design without repercussions. You can build a dam and generate power, but the forests downstream disappear, and so do the salmon. At the time of that realization, removing the dams and restoring the design becomes a cause of its own.
The Art
The Animations
The Hornet’s Spell in the TooFar Media App
The multimedia version of The Hornet’s Spell combines Rich’s novel with mesmerizing artwork by Dennis Martin and hypnotic animations.
Scan and download the TooFar Media App. Available on
iOS and Android.
Acclaim for The Hornet’s Spell
