The Gone Away Place

It’s been forever and a few days since I last posted anything on my website, but I wanted to make sure to note that today my new novel, The Gone Away Place, releases from Knopf Books for Young Readers. I’m excited as always to have a new book go out into the world, where it will hopefully find the exactly right readers who didn’t know they were even waiting for it, as well as those who have been eagerly anticipating it.

THE GONE AWAY PLACE

Some early reviews have already come in. Here are a few excerpts from those:

Barzak shows his expertise in conjuring a palpable sense of otherworldliness in this sad and eerie tale set in Ohio. The gray aura of tragedy might be oppressive if not for the book’s suspenseful elements and glimmers of light, small miracles that inspire hope and emotional healing. Ellie’s quest to find Noah and help other ghosts who want to be released from their bonds to earth is highly spiritual and deeply moving.  -Publishers Weekly, Starred Review  (Full Review can be found here.)

A Stranger Things–Twister mash-up for fans of (super)natural thrills. -Kirkus Reviews (Full review can be found here).

Ellie’s journey through the grief of her tremendous losses is one that will deeply impact readers, many of whom will identify with the experience of having friends or loved ones die unexpectedly. Barzak’s personal, poetic prose deftly exposes the complexity of grief, particularly in Ellie’s eventual goodbye to her friends, which gives a tangible form to an emotional act. But most of all, this is a novel about the importance of stories, reminding readers to be seen and heard; this is what will move us forward, both individually and as a society. – Booklist (Full Review)

If you’re interested in supporting the book, here are some easy ways to do that:

1. Talk about it on social media.
2. Share and repost posts you come across about it.
3. Buy it at an indie bookstore.
4. Or buy it wherever you’d like to buy it.
5. Ask for it at your library if they don’t already have it.
6. Review it on Goodreads & Amazon.com and other sites.
7. Take and share pics of it, if you spot it in the wild or get your own copy.

Hashtag it #thegoneawayplace

It’s hard for books to rise above all the white noise online, so your support is extremely appreciated!

You can purchase the book at:

Amazon

Barnes and Noble

Indie Bound

Or any other place where you like to buy books, of course.

Thank you, and if you read it, I hope you enjoy it!

Where Thy Dark Eye Glances

This month brings out an interesting anthology from Lethe Press, edited by Steve Berman. Entitled Where Thy Dark Eye Glances, the anthology collects stories from writers who are engaging with the work of Edgar Allan Poe in a queer manner.

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The anthology is divided into sections that categorize the type of interplay you’ll see from the writers working with Poe’s stories and poetry: Poe the Man (the man himself as character), Poe’s Writing (retellings), and Reading Poe (stories in which reading Poe is integral to the plot or characters).

I have a story of my own in the Poe’s Writing section, (“For the Applause of Shadows”) retelling his famous doppelgänger story “William Wilson” from the point of view of the doppelgänger, which, in my version of things, isn’t a doppelgänger at all, but a real person with whom the William Wilson who narrated the original story has had a sexual relationship, and in an attempt to bury that relationship, murders him. It rewrites the original tale, which is almost always read as a story about a narcissist whose double, representing his conscience, haunts him for his bad deeds. I’ve literalized that haunting, and have hopefully added a different dimension to the story by reading it as a tale of spurned love and revenge.

The anthology has a lot of wonderful stories in it. Richard Bowes’ story, “Seven Days of Poe” has got to be one of his finest pieces of fiction to date, and I seriously hope readers seek the anthology out for this story alone, because it deserves to be read and to be awarded things for how good it is. Matthew Cheney appears with his own retelling of “William Wilson” that is so completely meta, I felt truly disembodied while reading it. And Steve Berman himself puts a really cool spin on Poe the man, especially facile with writing in a Victoriana manner, with “Poetaster”.

One of the very cool things about this anthology is that it’s actually a part of a kind of series. Lethe Press has previously published a similarly themed anthology of queered revisions called A Study in Lavender: Queering Sherlock Holmes, in 2011. And after this Poe anthology, Lethe will be releasing another Queering the Canon anthology that employs the Bram Stoker’s most famous creation, Dracula. That anthology, Suffered from the Night, is due out next month, and I’m happily reading a pre-release copy at the moment (stories by Livia Llewellyn, Laird Barron, and Lee Thomas all really excellent).

Talking with Steve Berman recently, he plans to continue the series with an anthology dedicated to Arthurian Legend. A Good Deal More Than a King should release in 2015, and I’m reallylooking forward to it.

Reviewing Reviews

I’ve been remiss in blogging all of the reviews that Before and Afterlives has brought in. And while reviews don’t always interest everyone, they usually interest the writer of a book. So either indulge me or flee as fast as you can! One only has a book come out every so often (at least if you write at my pace), so I’m trying to enjoy the first several months in the life of my newest.

Last month, Lambda Literary reviewed the collection, and said this:

Barzak has a talent for pulling you into a story within the first two or three paragraphs. All writers strive to accomplish that, but few do with such regularity and finesse as Barzak. He weaves complex plotlines into a short space and brings to life an assortment of characters and personalities that each stand on their own as unique and believable, even amidst the supernatural hauntings.

– See the whole review by clicking here. 

Likewise the book lover Curt Jarrell had this to say:

Reading these tales is akin to consuming a literary banquet. You will be rewarded with the rich blend of fine, often lyrical writing, touches of the otherworldly (i.e. ghosts, mermaids, etc.), subtle plotting and characters you’ll identify with, people who will touch your heart. 

  The collection also contains a story I consider a masterpiece.Each detail, every word and description build images and emotions that linger in the mind and heart long after reading.

The Boy Who Was Born Wrapped in Barbed Wire” is a beautiful and terrible tale of a child born with a unique affliction. Easily the most lyrical of the collection, the story overflows with joy and sorrow, blood and laughter, love and loss. It is thought provoking and emotional. It reminded me of a story Flannery O’Connor might have written. I was dazzled, moved by it’s beauty and brought to tears at it’s conclusion. Wow!

You can read that entire review here.

And over at the Lit Pub, Eddy Rathke reviews the collection too:

Who is to say that the unreal and the real cannot inhabit the same pages? Barzak’s skill here is making a foundation in reality so solid and believable that when the world’s glimmering shifts fantastic you are so swept up in it that it had to be that way. His fiction does not contain magic and monsters to illustrate magic and monsters but to show how beautiful and unknown and haunting our world is. 

The entire review is readable by clicking here. 

Brit Mandelo at Tor.com reviews Before and Afterlives

And another great review for Before and Afterlives comes in. This one from Brit Mandelo at Tor.com. Brit takes the collection and analyzes it in depth, by way of three particular stories that display three very different styles or approaches I take in my writing. Being able to perceive something like that is particularly available for a reader to notice in a single author, full length collection that spans a decade of a writer’s stories. Which is why I love short story collections. There’s a breadth of vision to story collections, rather than the depth of the immersive experience novels tend to provide. 

In any case, here’s a bit of what Brit has to say. But you should really click over to read the entire piece:

“What We Know About the Lost Families of ——- House” is in the vein of a gothic. It has a haunted house, grim family secrets, incest, murder, and most of the other accoutrements. Barzak, though, takes the typical gothic and twists it by giving the narrative through a communal voice: a voice that represents the town itself, the people who make it up and who have observed ——- House’s history. In a move familiar from Barzak’s other stories, which are often densely and carefully constructed, this piece relies on strong, detail-oriented prose with an engaging voice; however, it also relies on the audience’s familiarity with the tropes of the genre to offer a different avenue of exploration.

The story is not told from the point of view of the young woman who marries into the House to communicate with its ghosts, as I’ve mentioned before, so it’s not a typical gothic. Moreover, and more interestingly, though the town’s communal narrative is concerned with rescuing her by the end and with telling us her story as if it’s tragic, it’s impossible to read it the way the townspeople want us to. Their patronizing tone, their willful ignorance and their excuses, render the reader unable to sympathize with their point of view entirely, so we cannot believe or support everything that they do or say. As with the underbelly of resentment, neighborly knowledge, and gossip in any small town, the town in which ——- House is located is conflicted, uneasy, and often judgmental. (Of course, considering the ending, they are perhaps not entirely wrong to want to burn the House to the ground.) This sense of play with form and with tropes is common to Barzak’s short fiction.

And, of course, so are the ghosts: Barzak’s fantastic work is often concerned with the strangeness that lies just outside of everyday life. In Before and Afterlives, as the title implies, there are many sorts of hauntings, not merely of houses and not all of them unpleasant. There is a resonance to these pieces about death and lingering, or about leaving and loss, or all of the above, that makes them quite memorable—just as much as the generic experimentation and the investment in telling different-but-familiar stories with rich characters and settings…

On the other hand, “Plenty” is a different sort of story, one that represents another thread in Barzak’s body of work. It’s set contemporarily, it deals with economic impoverishment, the decay of industrialism, and the fantastic alongside one another, and it offers—more than a plot, though it has one of those too—a developmental arc or moment in a person’s life. “Plenty” and other stories like it in this collection are, in a word, intimate. They are character driven, observational, and often the narrative arc serves a greater provocative emotional arc. In this piece, where friends come apart and together based on differences in their personalities and life choices, a fantastical table that makes feasts—but only for someone so generous as to want to give them away—helps the protagonist to see what he had been unable or unwilling to see about his good friend’s inner nature. The other man is able to reconsider his own distant friend’s apparent selfishness through his gift of the table, his willingness to part with it and to keep its secret for the betterment of the suffering community. (Put like that, it’s almost a parable.)

These characters and their realistic, unfortunate misunderstandings and misapprehensions are the focus of the tale. When Barzak is studying people, telling us their stories, his work is powerful; these stories incite a great deal of consideration about others, their needs, and the functions of living in a world where industrialism in the West is decaying and whole cities are ground under by poverty. Barzak’s background in an Ohio city of similar experience adds a distinct level of solidity to many of the stories set in or around that milieu, and offers the reader a glimpse into the sort of survival that those places require…

Before and Afterlives reveals a series of confluences and concerns in his short fiction, and as such, works remarkably well as a coherent collection. It’s a thoughtful, pleasant, and lingering sort of book: many stories, many lives, and many deaths to consider—as well as how these things, and the people that power them, intersect and reflect reality in a fantastical mirror.

Kirkus reviews Before and Afterlives

A late but  better than never review from Kirkus Reviews came for Before and Afterlives at the tail end of last week. It’s a goodie. I’m happy. I can only post a couple of lines from the review without infringing on copyright stuff, lalala, so I’ll post two of my favorite lines here, and then link to the rest of it, which you can read at the site itself.

“The 17 stories collected here bring readers into worlds where mermaids beckon to the sea, where a boy wrapped in barbed wire becomes wrapped up in love, where the end of the world is just another way to find yourself, and where ordinary characters meet extraordinary circumstances. Barzak takes what readers know (or think they do) and skews the view, exposing a new side of reality. Fans of speculative fiction especially will enjoy this ride through the fantastic worlds Barzak conjures.”

Read the rest by clicking here.

Sneak Peeks of Before and Afterlives (Born on the Edge)

Today’s preview from Before and Afterlives is the opening of my story,”Born on the Edge of an Adjective”. It’s a story about two lovers who can’t get it together, one of whom moves across the country to find himself, and is instead found by a different sort of love, an alien love. I mean that, too. An alien love, though you won’t be able to tell just how alien from this excerpt, which will seem fairly realistic. The story originally appeared in the very cool zine, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet.

Born on the Edge of an Adjective

“I was born on the edge of an adjective,” Neil tells me from San Francisco.  He’s calling on his new cell phone.  He bought it because he thought it would add a little something to his image, but now he’s not so sure.  “Everywhere I look, people have these stupid things,” he says.  “I didn’t realize till I had one of my own.”

“You were what?” I ask.

“I was born on the edge of an adjective,” he tells me.  “That’s for you,” he says, and pauses to drag on his cigarette.  “For your next song.  At least a line, if not the title.”

Neil’s calling from a bar called the Shamrock, which he’s frequented since leaving Youngstown behind.  In the background of his voice, the crack of pool and the sound of eighties music. I can almost smell the smoke, see the haze.  Neil hates eighties music, so I’m wondering why he’s there.  I’m wondering why he isn’t here with me.

“That’s a great line,” I say.  I don’t tell him that I don’t write songs anymore.  That when he left, the music went with him, that I haven’t written since.  “You should write it,” I tell him, and light a cigarette for myself.

“That’s your thing, Marco,” he says, and it still sends a thrill through my body to hear that name, instead of just Marc or Marcus.  Only Neil calls me something different from everyone else.

“So when are you coming back?” I ask, then immediately revise my question.  “When are you going to visit?”

“You know I can’t, Marco,” he says.  “I can’t come back, at least not for a while.  I have to find out who I am.  Ohio only obscures it.  We’ve gone over all this before.  Besides, I’m unboyfriendable.  You need someone better than me.  Someone solid.”

I nod in agreement, even though Neil can’t see.  He went a thousand miles away to find himself, which sounds lame as a talk show conversation, but he did it, and I still can’t help but ask when this self-imposed exile is going to end.  Neil might not know himself, but I could tell him.  I know who he is, he’s just not listening.  But when do any of us listen to what others have to say?  I don’t write music anymore.  I only listen.  If Neil asked me, I could sing him his song.

“I have to get going,” Neil says impatiently.  There’s the click of his lighter and the exhale of smoke.  “I have a date with this woman.  I need to meet her on the other side of town.”

“A woman?” I ask.

“She’s cool,” Neil says.  “A dancer, real light on her feet.  It’s like gravity has no effect on her.”

“So she floats?  That’s pretty amazing,” I say.

“Seriously, Marco, she made me practice lifting her for her next recital.  It was like picking up a teacup.  An empty  teacup.  You would like her.  Don’t be a cynic.  She’s our type.”

“That’s great,” I say.  I tell him, “Call me soon,” and put the phone down on its cradle.  I turn up the radio, thinking she is not our type, not mine at least, and I wouldn’t like her.  I already hate this woman, Neil, and she’s probably a bad dancer.  Her legs are skinny like a flamingo’s, and her hair is most likely blonde.  Also, she floats.  People who float aren’t people.  It’s like a law or something.  No floating for humans.

Neil likes his men different from his women.  He prefers his men quietly smoldering, with dark eyes and thick hair.  He likes his women blonde and loud as ambulances, with legs up to their chins.  He used to read books with grand plots and lifeless characters.  Now he reads books without plots that have grand characters, who think a lot throughout most of the book.

Take my hand, I want to tell him.  Let me lead you through the hall of mirrors.  I know your way.  If I were alone, I’d be lost myself.  But with you, I see the way clearly.

He wonders who he is, what it means to live in this world, how he’s supposed to be.  I’ve seen him clap his hands over his ears, as if the world grew too loud suddenly, and he sank down on my bed and curled into a fetal position.  He wants to know what he’s like, where he’s going, where he’s been.  He’s a blank slate, he tells me, a tabula rasa.  But this is not true.  A more accurate description is possible.

He was like a book left behind by some weary traveler, in a country where no one knows how to read.

Take my hand, I want to tell him.  Even though I’m blind on my own, I can see your path clearly.

*

     Where are you going?  Where have you been?  These questions were our constant conversation.  The first time we met, we were both at The Blue Note, one of the bars where the band I wrote songs for sometimes played.  They still have an ongoing gig there, but I don’t stop very often.  They leave messages, various members of Winterlong, the lead singer, the bass guitarist, the piano player, Harry, who always says they’re going downhill and need an injection of something new and different.  “Give me a call, Marcus,” he says.  “Let’s get together on something.”

Neil was standing at the bar, in front of an empty stool, drinking from a pony-necked bottle.  I sat three stools down.  Finally, after the band took a break, he walked over, sat beside me, and, without looking at me, said, “The songs are good, but they need a new singer.”  I laughed involuntarily, almost spitting out a mouthful of beer.

“Really?” I said, grinning.

“Most definitely.”

“And the songs?  What makes them more deserving?”

“They’re full of raw emotion.  The lead singer doesn’t know how to get that across.”

It was something I’d heard other people say about someone else’s music.  Something you might read in a review, or hear on a college campus amongst earnest but not so humble students.  But Neil was flattering.  This quality is a necessary attractor.  I was attracted, I cannot lie.

We went home that night together, after the band stopped playing, after closing down the Blue Note, and when we woke in the morning, him lying on his stomach, me flat on my back, his arm flung over my chest, I told him that I was the song writer.

“I knew that,” he said.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because you knew I knew.  Really, don’t act so innocent.”

Before and Afterlives Arrives

My first full length short story collection, Before and Afterlivesreleased this week! I’m sort of over the top excited by that, because since I was a teenager, I imagined my first book being a collection of short stories, something in the vein of Ray Bradbury or Shirley Jackson, but contemporary in style and setting. They were two of my favorite authors for the longest time, and I still feel their influences on me all these years later, after publishing a novel and a novel-in-stories prior to my adolescent-imagined short story collection.

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Before and Afterlives collects the majority of what I think of as my best and better stories from the last decade, the first decade of my life as a publishing writer. They are mainly stories of the supernatural, or contemporary fantasies (the word fantasy writers and publishers used to use for what is often now called urban fantasy, which is a term I think is too limiting in terms of setting). But there are several speculative fiction/scifi-ish stories included in the collection as well. In many ways, it’s the kind of mixed genre collection I used to enjoy as a young reader: in one story you’ll encounter a beached mermaid who is taken in by a woman whose daughter has disappeared, in another you’ll witness a haunted house destroy the lives of several different families over a century, and in yet another you’ll come across a young man whose lover has been stolen away from him someone who just might be an alien. There’s a girl who can call ghosts to her, and a man trying to survive the end of the world. There’s a contagion that causes people to vanish, little by little, and there’s a young man who makes his living by allowing other people to kill him for a fee, and to let them witness his remarkable ability to resurrect.

If I hadn’t written all of these stories, I would totally be wishing that someone else would have. I think that’s the writer’s impulse really. They’re readers who have become so obsessed by story that they are eventually moved to create their own stories, the ones they can’t find written by someone else.

It’s an odd thing. When I was growing up, short story collections were read as much as novels were, but times have changed. The poor short story has lost ardent fans the same way poetry has over the decades, and while I personally can’t understand why this would be–short stories are, to me, the perfect size to contain a narrative in its most distilled form, like strong whiskey–that’s how things are, regardless.

And on top of that, a lot of story collections are now published by smaller, independent presses, which have taken up the slack of larger, corporate publishing houses who specialize in producing novels. This also means it’s harder for those presses and authors to make people aware of their collections. My publisher, Lethe Press, went out on a limb to publish this collection, and I appreciate the efforts of the publisher, Steve Berman, and the beautiful interior design work done by Alex Jeffers, along with the awesome cover art made by Steven Andrew, in the production of this book.

So, dear reader, if you’re interested in helping me spread the word about mine, you can help in a variety of ways:

1.) Buy the book, and then review it somewhere. Like Amazon.com, or Barnes and Noble.com, or on Goodreads.com, etc. 

2.) Buy the book as a gift for someone you think might like it.

3.) Buy the book for someone  who is your frenemy and that you’re sure they won’t like it.

4.) Tell other people about it.

5.) Ask your local library to purchase a copy for the shelves.

6.) Ask your local brick and mortar bookseller to order it for their shelves.

7.) Have someone drive you down the street while you lean out the window with a bullhorn, announcing the title of the book and throwing candy at the youngsters lining the sidewalk.

8.) Blog about the book.

9.) Tweet or facebook about the book. Take photos of yourself reading it.

10.) Run for political office with the book as your main platform. Be sure to reference it in all of your speeches.

I’m sure there are other ways you can help, and I welcome any additional modes of promotion that I haven’t thought up yet to be listed in the comments of this post!

But in essence: new book is out! Thank you for buying, reading, reviewing (buying even if you don’t read or review it), and for being there, reader, both the ones who know who they are and the ones who don’t know just yet, but soon will be. 😉

Kindle edition also available here.