Julia Lombardi has no memories of her life before a couple of years ago. In the meantime, she has worked as a model for artists living in post-World War II Rome. When the famous surrealist Salvador Dalí offers her the chance to work as his model for Persephone in an eerie gothic garden called the Garden of Monsters, she jumps on the chance, despite her misgivings. Dalí is offering her a lot of money, and it will only be a week. No matter how bizarre the infamously eccentric artist is or how insufferable his domineering manager wife is, it will only be seven days. What could possibly go wrong?
However, as Julia soon sees, a lot can go wrong in seven days. The Dalís are even more strange and difficult than she had ever bargained for, Dalí himself begins to insist she is Persephone and forces her to eat pomegranate seeds, she hears unsettling whispers in the garden, and she can’t shake the feeling that their intense, mysterious, magnetic, handsome host Ignazio is someone she knows from somewhere. Amid the days of indulging Dalí’s increasingly tyrannical artistic whims and the nights of feasting on elaborate, sumptuous themed banquets in the historic palazzo attached to the garden, Julia herself starts to wonder if she is Persephone. . . .
Continue reading “Crystal King’s In The Garden of Monsters”
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