The Witch at Sparrow Creek

The specialty publishing company Hippocampus Press will take my first novel THE WITCH AT SPARROW CREEK (WITCH) to print in 2015. This was such terrific news. My editor S.T. Joshi has helped to shape this book over the past several years and he has been incredibly supportive of the novel. There were many other folks who have read earlier version of the book and helped me to keep going. It took me too long to finish because there were periods of many months when I didn’t work on the book at all because of other things going on.

The novel is the first in a series. WITCH follows the story of Jim Falk, an archetypal “monster hunter” who is searching for his lost father. The world that the novel is set in is a kind of mystical Appalachia of legend where witches and demons are very real – although people are beginning to disbelieve in such things. The mechanics of the larger world and forces will be deeply explored in the series to follow this first novel.

Jim Falk is pushed forward to finish the incomplete work of his father, which was to rid the land of evil spirits. But Jim was not a good student and soon became a drunk and an addict. He returns to his father’s work only because he is being haunted by strange dreams of a red headed woman and a dark figure. He seeks out his father’s former archivist, Spencer Barnhouse, to help him figure out what to do. Jim follows a trail of visions to the town, Sparrow, where he meets Violet Hill, who is the woman in his visions. She is being stalked by a “Spook”, which he then vows to hunt down and kill.

The novel was originally inspired by this book Appalachian Ghost Stories and Other Tales, and another by the same compiler, A Wayfaring Sin Eater and Other Tales – while these stories were not adventure stories, they sparked my imagination toward writing a book set in a legendary Appalachia. Appalachian Ghost Stories and Other Tales was a book that a friend of mine and I had stolen from a local library when I was a teenager, later I would marry the niece of the author, never making the connection until I saw the book on her father’s shelf. (Yes, that really happened.)

While Appalachian Ghost Stories was a sending off point for my imagination, the story was also largely influenced by paper and pencil roleplaying games that I played with high school friends. If they ever read the book, they will see names and themes that they recognize, but the story is all together new.

This book is not intended to fit in with the many more commercial novels that stock the shelves and the digital book world today. Those books are great reads and have so many imaginative, entertaining, and rich worlds to offer, but they are in their essence formulaic. While all story telling needs a formula, WITCH tries at something different.

My influences as a writer include (and this is by no means an exhaustive list) Robert E. Howard, C.S. Lewis, Stephen King, Lord Dunsany, Phillip K. Dick, and George Macdonald. I love these authors because the writing is not only exciting and adventurous, but finds means to something transcendent through language. What pushes readers in this direction can often be poetic and sometimes nonsensical turns and twists, uncanny characters, or even (gasp) dead ends in narratives. Pick up a Grimm’s Fairy Tale compendium and you will see the repetitions and the nonsense and find that this is what creates endurance for tales and allows them to breathe and grow and exist through the years. It’s kind of a big thing to reach for, but with these influences, I felt that I needed to stick to these beautiful older traditions and ways of storytelling.

At the same time, I fully realize that this is 2014. There are so many new ideas floating about and new ways that readers can absorb stories that I wanted to write with that in mind as well. What you’ll find in the pages of my book (hopefully) is a story that presses forward in odd turns and twists, but that does push forward – and also one that is poetic, thoughtful, and nonformulaic.

Thanks to everyone who’s had a part along the way – I look forward to seeing the proofs.