What inspired you to write Red Queen Yellow King: The Book of Alice #1?

The seed of this story grew from the knowledge that the fairy tales of my youth were just the bright, clean surface of a deep, dark well of folklore. I wanted to plunge back into that darkness, to take the beloved characters of Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan and add the grit and danger that time had scrubbed away from childhood stories. The idea was compelling to me, but it wasn’t whole. The final, crucial piece of the puzzle arrived, ironically, when I read The King in Yellow. Its lore became an obsession, providing the unique narrative thread that stitched everything together.

Welcome back to Wonderland.

Nothing here survives unchanged.

Red Queen, Yellow King

The Book of Alice #1
by Jack Finn
Genre: Dark Epic Fantasy, Alice in Wonderland Retelling

This is book #1 of The Book of Alice duology.

Wonderland has fallen. And something older than kings has taken its place. Alice returns to consciousness in a ruined palace, her body broken, her mind fractured, her sister enslaved by a queen who wears a crown of thorns and a smile of knives. The Looking Glass is shattered. The Hatter has turned. The White Queen is dead. But beyond the bloody thrones and broken teacups lies something even stranger—an echo of a play that should never be performed, whispered by a masked god in yellow. To save what little remains, Alice must navigate a sea of madness, hunt down a missing monarch, and confront the truth behind her own unraveling story. Some fairy tales end in fire. Others in silence.

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Excerpt from Red Queen, Yellow King: The Book of Alice #1 by Jack Finn

The Red Queen played the long game. She murdered the White Queen and spared Alice, Ava, Hatter, and Lady Cheshire the purge that followed; even Tinker was allowed to live just long enough to complete his devices for the journey. Holding Ava and the Cheshire girls hostage, even releasing the giants, was all part of a plan the Red Queen had mapped out in her mind well in advance. She wanted the Azure Queen dead and the Red King back. Now all her pieces were in play on the chessboard.

Like every game, chess had rules.

Alice never played by the rules.

She would make her own rules.

She would beat the Red Queen at her own game.

Alice doing Alice things.

Jack Finn is a horror author and active Horror Writers Association member living in the wilds of the Pacific Northwest with his wife and two fiendishly clever dogs. He is a lifelong believer that the Tooth Fairy proves you can trade body parts for cold, hard cash.

His books by the include, The Wolves of Kalinin werewolf duology: Prey Upon the Lambs (Anuci Press 2025) and The Desolation of Hunters (Anuci Press 2025); the horror collection They Come When You Sleep (Velox Books 2025), a re-envisioning of the Dracula mythos in the standalone novel The Seven Deaths of Prince Vlad (Anuci Press 2024), and the folk horror collection, Legend of the Deer Woman (Crow Street Press, 2023).

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