by e rathke
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GENRE: Fantasy
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BLURB:
“My name is Ineluki. I come from past the mountains and ice. It took me many days to reach here. All I know are dead. Will you take me in?”
And so begins a calamitous year at the edge of the world.
Chief for the year, Aukul's life has never been better. His people respect him, he spends his nights with the love of his life, and his skills as a butcher and chef improve every day. Then Ineluki, a young stranger, wanders into town with nothing but an empty book. He begins telling stories of the world beyond the one they know. His stories challenge their reality and lead to a summer of unprecedented disasters.
One by one, the villagers begin dancing. Dancing tirelessly, as if in a trance, until they die. Believing Ineluki is to blame, Aukul confronts him on the worst night of his life.
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EXCERPT
Umok was the first to see the boy. There was nothing special about the boy except that he wasn’t one of us and didn’t seem to be an Uummanuq. Not that anyone really knew, then, what the Uummanuq looked like. Not really. But he was too tall to be one of them and much too short to be one of us. Maybe strangest of all, he was dressed as a woman. One of ours, not the Uummanuq women, assuming anyone knew, then, what the Uummanuq looked like when they weren’t smashing our homes down. But he wore a loose, open vest, his trousers tight and reaching just past his knees. In his hands, a hidebound book.
It was a clear day, just past spring, and though the edge of the world is known for its deathly cold, our summers are quite warm. Warm enough to wade out into the sea and gather crabs or lobster. Or even to swim out to where the leviathans burst through the water, spraying the skies with their misted breath.
Umok was so distracted by the boy that she dropped her arm, accidentally flinging her gyrfalcon, Feo, to the ground. When Feo shrieked the way she does, the boy turned to Umok and smiled a big toothy grin. To hear Umok tell it later, the boy had fangs like a wolf and eyes that glowed with menace.
We’re not prone to superstition, but much changed that summer and especially come winter, when the days last barely a blink and the nameless ones call out to us in the long night, and mothers wake to missing children, never to be seen again.
But the boy didn’t stop when he saw Umok. It was like he had a set destination. Like he knew where we were. And maybe that’s the most shocking of all. That he just wandered out from the dark green summer mountains and walked right to our little village at the edge of the world with nothing but the clothes he was wearing, an empty book, and a mouthful of words that would change the shape of all our lives.
A Word With the Author
1.Did you always want to be an author?
Not always but I never wanted to have a real job. Ever since I was a child and we took those career competency tests, I always dreamt of doing none of those things. I don’t even want to do the job I have now, let alone some theoretical good job.
I haven’t always wanted to be an author but I have wanted to be a writer for a very long time. Even before I wrote my first stories down and hated every single sentence, I was inventing worlds. Inventing stories. Trying to take all that was within me and translate them into language. Make those words matter, not only to me, but to someone else.
I still read compulsively, the way I did as a child. I can’t remember the last time I wasn’t reading a book. And so it was when I was a child, falling into new worlds, whether Middle Earth or the London Dickens invented, I have always plunged deep into worlds made of words.
2.Tell us about the publication of your first book.
The publication process itself was fairly straightforward, but the production of the book itself was a bit stranger. I was taking a break from a different novel—one that kept expanding at an alarming rate—and decided to tackle something simpler.
Well, I don’t know that Glossolalia is actually simpler than that other yet-to-be-published novel, but it’s certainly shorter! Glossolalia was a chance to play with ideas, with form, with structure. Where that other novel was a massive epic fantasy stretching well over a thousand pages, Glossolalia comes in at about 200 pages. Rather than a perspective planted firmly in one person’s head, Glossolalia is a bit more congenial with its cast. Characters come together and dance, they talk and they laugh, they shudder in the dark and hold one another through horrors. It's the story of people but also of apeople. A culture. A place. A way of life, threatened.
It’s a story of language and the stories we tell to give shape to our lives.
3.Besides yourself, who is your favorite author in the genre you write in?
Narrowing this down to one person is mostly impossible, but I will say that this specific novel is very indebted to the work of Ursula K Le Guin. What she showed me was the endless possibility of fantasy and the beauty of not knowing. She showed me that fantasy did not require kings and knights or even the wizards that defined your series. We could tell simple stories in fantastical worlds about simple people. People like you and me. People living lives like anyone else.
It takes great courage to show the common place bravery of normal people of no pedigree or distinction. Le Guin was not the only one to do this, of course, but the poetic beauty she gave to people’s lives and the focus she gave to ways of life lit a fire inside me that has yet to go out.
4.What’s the best part of being an author? The worst?
The best part of being an author is the writing. I don’t understand writers who say otherwise. My feeling is that if you don’t love writing, then you shouldn’t keep writing. Definitely don’t read people who aren’t in love with writing.
I often hear authors complain about the writing itself. Even some will say it’s the worst part of being a writer, which is just nonsense. Writing is fun! It’s about the most fun you can have alone with a keyboard. We sit and we invent. We create worlds and people. We tell stories and, ideally, there’s someone out there on the otherside reading our stories.
I love writing. Have loved writing since I first began writing. If I hadn’t found it fun, I wouldn’t be here now, typing these very words. Wouldn’t have spent fifteen years writing nearly every day for an audience of almost no one.
The worst part of writing is, in my experience, the petty dramas that define online writing communities. The constant bickering and subtweeting and fake congratulations. So much of it is an unpleasant game full of social climbers.
Of course, one of the true benefits of writing is that you do it alone. You don’t need to engage with these people.
5.What are you working on now?
Just a few weeks ago, my friends and I were talking about their forthcoming cyberpunk novels (Dying World and Mercy, both coming December 1st from Broken River Books!), and I got the potentially terrible idea to dive in and publish right alongside them. So I may have a cyberpunk novel coming out on December 1st.
Though it’s sort of an odd angle into a cyberpunk world, as I begin the novel with a solarpunk community in a postapocalyptic earth. A raid leads two young people to leave their peaceful commune and enter a techno-nightmare world of cybernetics and bioengineering in hopes of saving a handful of abducted children.
It’s a thriller—which is about as different from Glossolalia as something can get—with wild technology, monsters, fungal magic, love, and heartbreak. Right now, it’s called Howl and I’ll probably stick with that name, now that I’ve said it somewhere online. Look for it in a few weeks.
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AUTHOR Bio and Links:
e rathke writes about books and games at radicaledward.substack.com. A finalist for the 2022 Baen Fantasy Adventure Award, he is the author of Glossolalia and several other forthcoming novellas. His short fiction will appear in Queer Tales of Monumental Invention, Mysterion Magazine, and elsewhere.
Amazon Link: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0BCDVFZHM/
Goodreads Link:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61961144-glossolalia-or-don-t-scream-it-on-the-mountain
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GIVEAWAY INFORMATION
e rathke will be awarding a $50 Amazon or Barnes and Noble GC to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour.
