Every culture tells itself stories to survive. Some are myths of love and destiny. Others are rituals of control.
The Breeding (2025), originally published as The Gorge, plunges readers into the perilous migrations of the Cliff Dwellers, a people who move each year between highlands and lowlands in search of food, safety, and renewal. Within their fragile order lies a ritual no one dares to question: the Breeding of the Virgins. Orphaned girls of age are offered to the elders under the guise of duty and faith. Their children, taken and raised by the tribe, are said to strengthen the People.
Maxtla, a girl bound to a merchant who calls himself her protector, is chosen for the ritual. She prepares herself as tradition dictates-finery, shells, furs-believing what she's been told: that this is honor, that this is survival. What she encounters instead is humiliation, exploitation, and a revelation that burns away her innocence.
To see the truth is dangerous. To speak it is heresy. Yet Maxtla's clarity spreads like sparks among other young women who begin to question the lies beneath their culture's survival. If their leaders can sanctify rape, what else is sacred only because men say it is?
At once anthropological and visceral, The Breeding is a study of power, obedience, and resistance. It blends speculative world-building with a journalist's unflinching eye, peeling back the myth of tradition to reveal its cost.
For readers of Margaret Atwood, Octavia Butler, and Jean Auel, this is more than fiction. It is a warning that the stories we sanctify today may already carry tomorrow's violence.
Autorentext
What many call careers, Joe Zeigler calls interests. Beginning as a firefighter in Williamsburg, Virginia, Zeigler left to earn a degree in fire protection from Oklahoma State University, picking up a BA in business along the way
Taking a job as a fire protection engineer with Kemper Insurance somehow led to a ten-year stint as a professional motorcycle racer
In 1981, Zeigler founded the Penguin Road Racing School and wrote How to Fly, a how-to manual for motorcycle racers. Intrigued by the developing world of personal computers, he retired from racing to become a consultant for Digital Equipment Corporation
Zeigler launched six computer stores and the nation's first computer discount warehouse?only to lose them at the hands of an arsonist. He rebounded to write FirePrograms, a software package for fire departments and the world's first low-priced UPS shipping manifest software. He sold both businesses to focus on his writing.