Disenchanted began as a love letter to my wife. We both loved fantasy and comic books, and this was originally going to be a graphic novel for her. Because when you love your wife, you do cool things for her. And then she left me while I was halfway through. I shelved it for a bit until a friend encouraged me to pick it back up. At some point, there is a hard shift in the story, but I like to think that’s where it really ratchets up.
Rowan Moor spends his days buried beneath Castle Riverstone, scraping wyvern filth from royal saddles while Bloomtide preparations transform the kingdom of Florinth into a parade of silk, flowers, and carefully manicured lies. From the stable yard below the palace terraces, he watches a world he will never belong to… especially the princess whose brief acts of kindness have quietly ruined his ability to want anything smaller.
Then somebody loads him into a trebuchet.
Hurled beyond the kingdom’s borders into the local enchanted forest, Rowan survives what should have killed him only to discover survival may have been the worse outcome. The forest does not behave as the stories claim. Its creatures are ancient, territorial, and dangerously whimsical. Its magic changes people, and somewhere beneath the impossible landscapes and fairy bargains lurks a truth the kingdom has spent generations trying to bury.
Now transformed into something monstrous and stranded among creatures that view crowns as a disease, Rowan finds himself dragged into a world of manipulative hags, a prophetic cyclops, bureaucratic wolves, murderous fair folk, and a five-foot-tall “gnome” who insists he is perfectly normal.
As Bloomtide celebrations continue back in Riverstone, Rowan begins uncovering the rot hidden beneath Flortinth’s beauty… and learns the kingdom may fear the forest for very good reason.
As the first installment of my Disenchanted series, The Beast in the Garden is a dark fantasy adventure blending dangerous fairy tales, folklore horror, sharp humor, monstrous transformation, political decay, and emotionally grounded characters into a story about beauty, identity, loneliness, and the lies people build entire kingdoms upon.
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