Tuesday, April 10, 2012

New magical realism novel

My latest e-book novel (I might take it to print eventually) has been a stretch for me as a writer. It is magic realism, which is a difficult genre to explain. Magic realism is generally accepted as a sub-genre of fantasy literature, but that's a bit of a stretch. At its most basic, magic realism stories are ones in which the characters and the world take speculative and fantastical elements for granted, such elements being common in the stories but not necessarily essential to the plot. Even that definition doesn't sound right, but it's the closest I can come to at the moment.

Then there's the fact my novel, 100 Years of Blood, doesn't necessarily fit into the definition I just gave. Are there fantastic and/or speculative elements in my novel? Yes. No. Maybe. The truth? I'm not telling. No, I'm not trying to get people to read my book to find out, but the very purpose of this novel is for the possible speculative elements to be something of a mystery. Are they really there? Obviously there are some odd things going on here and there within my story, but I don't explain them. On purpose.

100 Years of Blood might not find a readership. It is not a straight-forward novel with a hero and heroine and villain, nor is it meant to be plotted by pinpoint ... event A happens, event B happens, event C, etc. It is also not a novel of answers, but a novel of questions. I do not explain certain elements to readers, which might be this books downfall.

I want the readers to think for themselves, to come to their own conclusions. Do I have an idea of what's really going on in 100 Years of Blood? Sure I do, but I'm not telling. That would defeat the purpose of writing the novel in the first place.

What this novel does (or I hope it does) is to present certain characters in a situation that might seem relatively straight forward at first. The reader will likely quite easily pick up on certain things that will lead them in a particular direction. But is that direction the right one? Or is there truly any direction at all? Are these characters who and what we think they are? And do the events of this novel mean what we think they mean, if anything?

My goal with this novel was not necessarily to be obtuse for the sake of it, but to challenge the reader. I read a lot, and many novels (especially modern ones) wrap everything up with a nice bow at the end, where we get all the answers to everything and every character gets what's coming to them. This is not the case in 100 Years of Blood. It might seem that my novel rambles, but it does not, and it might seem somewhat wordy, which it probably is, but on the plus side it's only about 65,000 words, so it shouldn't take long to read it.

Now that I've ran my mouth off enough about 100 Years of Blood, here is the actual blurb:

During the early years of the 20th Century, a servant of an English lord arrives in an isolated county among the hills of Appalachia and begins work on a house large enough and fine enough for retiring nobility. For retirement seems to be the goal of Richard Abingdon. Retirement from the nobility, retirement from the world, retirement from life. With the building of this house comes a new community not far away, and Lord Abingdon soon finds he can isolate himself physically, but the world goes on around him and will even intrude upon him.

100 Years of Blood is the tale of the rise and fall of the House of Abingdon during a century. This is a novel of questions, not answers, focusing upon the individuals who come and go within the house, the servants, and the seemingly never-aging residents. Is there true mystery here? Or is what is presented all there is to see? The answers lie within the reader, for each must decide for oneself.

Where can one find this e-book novel? The usual places:
Amazon
Smashwords
Barnes & Noble (coming soon ... like within the next 24 hours)

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