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!

Sneak Peeks of Before and Afterlives (The Language of Moths)

Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll  be posting previews from the 17 stories in my new short story collection, Before and Afterlives. If you like what you read, take a hop over to your favorite online bookseller and purchase either the print book or the e-book, and leave a review when you’re finished reading. It helps other people figure out if they’d like to read the book (and strokes my ego, at least when they’re good reviews). ;-)

Today’s preview is the opening to my novelette, “The Language of Moths”, which was a Nebula finalist in 2006.  It’s a story about a family from Boston who travel to the Allegheny Mountains, where the father, an entomologist, is seeking out a moth he remembers seeing as a young person when his family camped there, one that he knows has not been identified before. What they find, however, are the fault lines in all of their relationships as a family. And in the case of some characters, they find a new language to speak when they encounter a deeply magical place.

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The Language of Moths

1. Swallowing Bubbles

The four of them had been traveling for what seemed like forever, the two in the front seat rattling maps like they did newspapers on Sunday mornings.  They rode in the wagon, her favorite car, the one with the wood paneling on its doors.  The wagon wound through the twisty backroads of the mountains, leaving behind it clouds of dust through which sunlight passed, making the air shimmer like liquid gold.  The girl wanted the wagon to stop so she could jump out and run through the golden light behind her.  She climbed halfway over the back seat and pushed her face against the rear window, trying to get a better look.

The little old man beside her shouted, “No! No! No! Sit down, you’re slobbering all over the glass.  Sit down this instant!”  He grabbed her around her waist and pulled her back into a sitting position.  He pulled a strap across her chest, locking it with a decisive click.  The little old man narrowed his eyes; he waved a finger in the girl’s face.  He said things at her.  But as his words left his lips, they became bubbles.  Large silver bubbles that shimmied and wobbled in the air.  The bubbles filled the car in mere moments.  So many words all at once!  The girl laughed delightedly.  She popped some of the bubbles between her fingers.  Others she plucked from the air and swallowed like grapes.  She let them sit sweetly on her tongue for a while, before taking them all the way in for good.  When the bubbles reached her stomach, they burst into music.  The sound of them echoed through her body, reverberating.  She rang like a bell.  One day, when she swallowed enough bubbles, she might understand what the little old man beside her was saying.  All of the time, not just now and then.  Maybe she’d even be able to say things back to him.  She wondered if her own words would taste as sweet.  Like honey, maybe.  Or like flowers.

2. Being Selfish

Eliot is watching his mother hang bed sheets from a cord of clothesline she’s tied off at two walls facing opposite of each other in their cabin.  “To give us all a sense of personal space,” she explains.  Eliot tells his mother that this cabin is so small, hanging up bed sheets to section off rooms is a futile activity.  “Where did you learn that word,” his mother asks.  “Futile.  Who taught you that?”

“At school,” Eliot says, paging through an X-Men comic book, not bothering to look up.

His mother makes a face that looks impressed.  “Maybe public school isn’t so bad after all,” she says.  “Your father was right, as usual.”

Eliot doesn’t know if his father is right, or even if his father is usually right, as his mother seems to imagine.  After all, here they are in the Allegheny Mountains, in Pennsylvania, for God’s sake, hundreds of miles away from home.  Away from Boston.  And for what?  For a figment of his father’s imagination.  For a so-called undiscovered moth his father claims to have seen when he was Eliot’s age, fourteen, camping right here in this very cabin.  Eliot doesn’t believe his father could remember anything that far back, and even if he could, his memory of the event could be completely fictional at this point, an indulgence in nostalgia for a time when his life still seemed open in all directions, flat as a map, unexplored and waiting for him.

Eliot’s father is an entomologist.  His specialty is lepidoptera, moths and butterflies and what Eliot thinks of as creepy-crawlies, things that spin cocoons around themselves when they’re unhappy with their present circumstances and wait inside their shells until either they’ve changed or the world has, before coming out.  Eliot’s father is forty-three years old, a once-celebrated researcher on the mating habits of moths found in the Appalachian Mountains.  He is also a liar.  He lied to his grant committee at the college, telling them in his proposal that he required the funds for this expedition to research the habits of a certain species of moth with which they were all familiar.  He didn’t mention his undiscovered moth, the one that glowed orange and pink, as he once told Eliot during a reverie, with his eyes looking at something unimaginably distant while he spoke of it.  Maybe, Eliot thinks, an absurd adventure like this one is a scientist’s version of a mid-life crisis.  Instead of chasing after other women, Eliot’s father is chasing after a moth that, let’s face it, he probably imagined.

“There now, isn’t that better?”  Eliot’s mother stands in the center of the cabin, which she has finished sectioning into four rooms.  The cabin is a perfect square with clothesline bisecting the center in both directions, like a plus sign.  Eliot owns one corner, and Dawn, his sister, has the one next to his:  That makes up one half of the cabin.  The other half has been divided into the kitchen and his parents’ space.  The sheet separating Eliot’s corner from his sister’s is patterned with blue flowers and tiny teacups.  These sheets are Dawn’s favorites, and secretly, Eliot’s too.

Eliot’s mother glances around, smiling vaguely, wiping sweat off of her brow.  She’s obviously happy with her achievement.  After all, she’s an academic, a philosopher, unaccustomed to cleaning house and rigging up clotheslines and bed linen.  The maid back in Boston–back home, Eliot thinks–Marcy, she helps around the house with domestic things like that.  Usually Eliot’s mother uses her mind to speculate on how the mind works; not just her own mind–but the mind–the idea of what a mind is.  Now she finds herself using her mental prowess to tidy up a ramshackle cabin.  Who would have guessed she’d be so capable?  So practical?  Not Eliot.  Certainly not herself.

The door to the cabin swings open, flooding the room with bright sunlight that makes Eliot squint.  He shields his eyes with one hand, like an officer saluting, to witness the shadowy figure of his father’s body filling the doorframe, and his sister Dawn trailing behind.

Dawn is more excited than usual, which has made this trip something less than a vacation.  For Eliot’s father, Dr. Carroll, it was never a vacation; that was a well-known fact.  For Dr. Carroll, this was an expedition, possibly his last chance to inscribe his name in History.  But the rest of the family was supposed to “take things easy and enjoy themselves.”  When Dr. Carroll said that, Eliot had snorted.  Dr. Carroll had placed his hands on his hips and glowered. “Why the attitude, Eliot?” he’d asked.

“Take it easy?” Eliot repeated in a squeaky-scratchy voice that never failed to surface when he most needed to appear justified and righteous.  “How can you expect us to do that with Dawn around?”

Dr. Carroll had stalked away, not answering, which didn’t surprise Eliot at all.  For most of his life, this is what Eliot has seen whenever he questions his father:  his father’s back, walking away, leaving a room full of silence.

Dawn pushes past Dr. Carroll and runs over to Eliot’s cot.  She jumps on the mattress, which squeals on old coils, and throws her arms across the moth-eaten pink quilt.  The quilt smells of mold and mildew and something a little like mothballs, as if it had been stored in a cedar chest for a long time.  Dawn turns to Eliot, her wide blue eyes set in a face as white and smooth as porcelain, and smiles at him, her blonde hair fanning out on the pillow.  Eliot considers her over the top of his comic book, pretending not to have noticed her.

Dawn is autistic.  She’s seventeen years old, three years older than Eliot.  But when she’s around, Eliot feels as if he’s already an old man, forced into an early maturity, responsible for things no fourteen year old boy should have to think about.  He blames this all on his parents, who often encourage him when he pays attention to Dawn, who often scold him when he wants something for himself.  “Being selfish,” is what his mother calls that, leaving Eliot dashed to pieces on the rocks of guilt.  He feels guilty even now, trying to read the last page of his comic book instead of paying attention to Dawn.

“I’m leaving,” Dr. Carroll announces.  He’s wearing khaki pants with pockets all over them, and a wide-brimmed hat with mosquito netting pulled down over his face.  A backpack and sleeping bag are slung on his back.  He lifts the mosquito netting and kisses Eliot’s mother on her cheek and calls her Dr. Carroll affectionately, then looks at Eliot and says, “You take care of Dawn while I’m away, Eliot.  Stay out of trouble.”

He walks outside, and all of them–Eliot, Dawn and their mother–move to the doorway.  As if magnetized by Dr. Carroll’s absence, they try to fill the space he’s left.  They watch him become smaller and smaller, a shadow, until he reaches the trail that will take him farther into the graying mountains, where his moth awaits.

“Good luck,” Eliot’s mother whispers, waving goodbye to his back, his nets and pockets.  She closes her eyes and says, “Please,” to something she cannot name, even though she no longer believes in higher powers, ghosts or gods of any sort.

Sneak Peeks of Before and Afterlives (A Resurrection Artist)

Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll occasionally be posting previews from the 17 stories in my new short story collection, Before and Afterlives. If you like what you read, take a hop over to your favorite online bookseller and purchase either the print book or the e-book, and leave a review when you’re finished reading. It helps other people figure out if they’d like to read the book (and strokes my ego, at least when they’re good reviews). 😉

Today’s excerpt comes from “A Resurrection Artist” which was published in 2004, in the UK magazine, The Third Alternative, which was rebranded a year or so after the story came out as the magazine now called Black Static. It’s a story I was thinking about while my reading took me across both Kafka’s “A Hunger Artist” and Sylvia Plath’s poem “Lady Lazarus”. I’ve always been interested in writing about characters whose talents (often magical gifts and/or curses) are somehow used or abused by others for personal gain, and I’ve always been interested in cultures of spectacle (like our own here in the U.S.). This is one of my stories where those interests converged.

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A Resurrection Artist

Lying here in this abandoned hotel, I have done it once again. Once every year or so, depending on my finances, I allow myself to die. It’s a way of life, a means to an end, or an end to life as a way of surviving. Any way you look at it, my body is a miracle.

Now comes the burning sensation of re-entry, a tingling that grows to feel like fire.  As I find myself returning to my body, every cell expands, flooding with electricity. Then my eyes blink over and over, making adjustments to reality and to the grade of light. I gasp for a first breath, then howl like a newborn. After this I can begin to see the people who killed me hovering over my body, their oval faces peering down, curious, amazed.

This audience has been the eighth group to kill me. It was a thrill for them, I’m sure, even though some have already seen me do this. I’m developing a following. Times are rough, Jan constantly tells me. People need something to believe in. Jan is my manager. She’s my sister, too. Improvisation, spins on old ideas, variations on a theme, she advises, is what’s needed to keep this act alive.

This act can’t die, though, even if I tried. Like the cat, I have nine lives. More than nine most likely, but in matters like this there’s always the unpredictable to take into account. So far, though, Jan and I haven’t figured out how to mess up death.

A young man wearing a dark suit says, “This can’t be happening.” I cough and spit up blood in my hands. There’s a golden ring on one of my fingers that wasn’t there when I died. This must be what I brought back this time. I try to recall how they killed me, but can only remember in pieces: a burn under my ribs where a knife slid in, the jolt of a gunshot splitting my chest open, my eyes flooding with blood after the blow of a hammer.

“Believe,” says Jan. I follow her voice to find her standing beside me. She waves her hand over my body, from head to toe. “You did it yourselves,” she tells them. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is his body, his arms, his legs, his head and torso. You’ve kept vigil beside him since the moment of death. I hope the experience has been satisfying.”

There’s an old lady whose eyes have slowly narrowed to slits. “I’m not so sure,” she says. “I mean, I know he died.  We saw the heart monitor, the flat line. But now that he’s alive again, it just doesn’t seem fair.”

A typical reaction, really. Some people are confused about what they truly want. She didn’t pay for a resurrection; she only wanted the death.

But we have their money, ten thousand dollars a head, and there are eight of them. We kept this group small since outings like this–a killing instead of a suicide–are illegal. Hence the abandoned hotel, once known as The Flamingo. The carpet, the striped wallpaper, the floor of the drained pool, everything here is pink.

“Mrs. Bertrand,” Jan says, “you’ve just witnessed a miracle. My little brother, barely twenty-three years old, allowed you to kill him so he could return to us from death. How can you possibly be disappointed?”

Mrs. Bertrand sniffles. “Oh yes,” she says. “I know. I wasn’t really complaining. Don’t mind me.”

Jan smiles. Mrs. Bertrand smiles.  The rest of the killers smile. I try, but only manage a weak sneer.

Sneak Peeks of Before and Afterlives (Dead Letters)

Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll occasionally be posting previews from the 17 stories in my new short story collection, Before and Afterlives. If you like what you read, take a hop over to your favorite online bookseller and purchase either the print book or the e-book, and leave a review when you’re finished reading. It helps other people figure out if they’d like to read the book (and strokes my ego, at least when they’re good reviews). 😉

The first preview is from a short story called “Dead Letters” that was originally published in Realms of Fantasy in 2006. I can’t say much about the story without spoiling the “reveal” it hinges upon, but I’ll say it’s the sort of story where the real and the imagined, the earthly and the supernatural, are difficult to tell apart. At least at first.

Dead Letters

Dear Sarah,

I have heard of your great misfortune to have gone and died so suddenly.  Now I find myself writing after so many years have passed between us in the hopes that perhaps this news is not true.  For a long time I believed I was dead too.  Then one day someone called my name (“Alice.  Do you remember her?  Alice Likely.  How she loved that girl.”) and I opened my eyes in a dark place, like a fairy tale princess trapped in a coffin.  Light appeared suddenly, a flash so sharp and blinding, it pricked my eyes and made them water.  Anyone passing by might have thought I was crying.  I must have looked so sad.

And someone did stop beside me.  I was still trapped in that dark place, my body bagged in a sack of unbeing, but the flash of light had ripped a hole in the darkness.  Through that opening, two hands reached in and gripped both sides of the fissure.  The hands pulled the gap wider and wider until daylight surrounded me, and trees sprang up, row after row of them.  Birds called out.  Their notes pierced my eardrums like needles.  I heard water, and then there it was too–a stone fountain next to the bench I lay upon, and the birds perched upon the fountain’s ledge staring at me, their eyes black and serious.

Whoever freed me disappeared before I could pull myself together.  A newspaper lay open across my chest, and another on my legs.  I sat up and the paper on my legs slid to the ground, rattling.  I held on to the section covering my chest and looked at it for a moment, only to see your name glaring up at me, as if your name had a life of its own, had your eyes and the looks  you could give with them, and so your name glared at me in such a way that I could not help but notice it.  It said you were dead.  Twenty-eight years old.  A promising local artist.  Survived by her mother and father.  Their names were listed as well, but it hurt to look at them.  Particularly your mother’s.  She never liked me and I still don’t know why.  What did I ever do to her?

I am writing in the hopes that there may still be a chance for us to reconcile, to come together, to answer some of the questions that have burned inside me since you said goodbye.  Why did you betray me?  Whatever happened to our promise?  And where have I been for so long, asleep and waiting for someone to wake me?  Why didn’t you do that?  I don’t even recognize my own body.  My legs are long and my feet are large.  When I peered into the fountain water, a face looked back that belonged to a stranger.  Then the fountain turned on again, displacing the water, and the face broke apart into ripples.

Now I am writing this to you.  Will you please talk to me?  Can we forgive one another?

Love,

Alice

*

     I am writing in a notebook stolen from Rexall’s drugstore, the sort of book Sarah and I used in school years ago, for doodling and note-taking.  The cover of it looks like the black and white static on a dead television channel.  “Snow,” Sarah’s father used to call that.  “Nothing but snow here,” he’d say, flipping the channel until something lively and entertaining appeared.  He favored shows about policemen and vigilantes who saved the lives of people who could not save themselves from danger.  He instructed the vigilantes and policemen on how to go about all of this saving-of-lives business, spouting advice from his reclining chair, waving the remote control like a scepter.   Sometimes the vigilantes listened to him, sometimes they didn’t.  But they always saved the helpless victims in the end.

The pharmacist and his wife didn’t recognize me.  But I didn’t recognize them at first either.  They are old and gray now.  Mrs. Hopkinsey’s face sags.  Her teeth are not her teeth any longer.  I know this because I remember they were yellow and crooked and now they are white and bright and not so narrow; they line up in her mouth like good soldiers.  She smiled at me.  “Can I help you, dear?”

Such a nice woman, just as I remember.  I told her I was browsing, and she nodded and turned back to shuffling cigarette packs into the storage bin over the checkout counter.

I walked the aisles slowly, touching candy bars, tubes of lipstick, barrettes in the shape of butterflies.  I spun the comic book rack and paged through magazines, but the women inside were strange and alien, their faces harsh, skin like plastic or velvet.  Too smooth.  Their outlines blurred into the backgrounds.  I found that a familiar feeling, though, and felt a stab of pity for the cover girl’s blurry faces.

The greeting cards stood on the same shelves that they always had; I picked through them.  One said, “I feel so lonely with you not here.”  On the cover was a picture of a little girl looking up at the moon, holding a doll at her side.  Inside it read, “But we’ll always be friends, no matter what the distance.”  I found myself crying, and stuffed the card under the waistband of my pants, covering it up with my sweater.  I looked to see if anyone had seen me take it, but Mrs. Hopkinsey still restocked cigarettes and Mr. Hopkinsey stood behind the medicine counter, measuring out pills for a customer.

If Sarah had been there, she would have been the one to take the card.  I would have been the lookout.  Those had been our positions when we were children.  I felt a little guilty changing places with her, like borrowing a friend’s sweater and not returning it, even though you know how they love it so.

I found the notebook in the next aisle over.  I hadn’t known I was going to take it either.  I needed things without knowing what I needed, so I let my hands think for me.  They reached out and took things:  the greeting card, several envelopes, the notebook, pens, a bar of chocolate, a ten dollar bill crumpled up on the black and white checkered floor.  I used the money to buy a soda and a bag of potato chips, so as not to be suspicious.  Mrs. Hopkinsey rang me up with her new smile still flashing, and when she handed me my change, I thought, I am home.

Click here to purchase the book and read the entire story (among 16 others!)

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.