Coming soon!

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Another life form has crawled out of the cellar of my unconscious. I didn’t think my first novel, Tanner’s Glen, had a sequel, but I was wrong. I found it down there, scuttling in the dark, pale and malformed, but with a savage desire to live. So, I decided to feed it, and see if it would grow.

Tanner’s Glen was a simple story: Lonely boy meets a monster in the woods. Boy falls in love with Monster, though he’s sure she plans to eat him. Then, government agents come to kill Monster and boy fights to protect her. But before agents can get them, Monster kills agents and…well, you’ve read the story. You know how it ends.

Noah Weismann’s story is finished, I think. But long after he’d vanished into that New Hampshire wilderness, I kept thinking about all the wonderful things I discovered in the world he left behind.

I kicked these curiosities around with no real intention of doing anything with them. 

Then, one day, I saw a monster in the woods.

The spark of creation often strikes without warning, manifesting as a visceral scene that sends me looking for pen and paper. So it was, one rainy afternoon on a hiking trail, not far from home.

Maybe I was drawn by movement or just the unusual quality of the light that day. I paused at a footbridge overlooking a creek, where my gaze settled to a hollow in the woods. Within the columns of bur oaks and the white flanks of sycamores was a clearing, carpeted in moss. There was a life-force there, among the dun-colored stones and nurse logs shelved with fungus. It reminded me of places you’d expect to find creatures with fur and teeth or things with slime coats and venom sacks, ravenous from long hibernation. 

I thought about going down for a look. But someone was already there.

A young boy was squatting on his heels, staring at something at the base of one of those huge oaks. He was no older than thirteen, and so still, one might never see him. He might have been shivering, underdressed for the weather as he was, but was too fixated on what was happening under the tree to care, or to notice me.

I saw something else move in that hollow, pale and sinuous.

I would have shouted at him to get back, but it was too late. The boy clearly wasn’t afraid, which was too bad. Meanwhile that thing un-coiled, reaching out, like a root seeking sunlight. To my horror and fascination, the kid extended his own hand, meeting it half way.

I didn’t see what happened next. In the way of visions, the scene faded before resolution, but I had the bud of a story in my brain.

I went home and wrote. I had to know what happened to that kid. More, I wanted to know what circumstances had led him to that grove, and why he was so psychologically damaged that he lacked a healthy fear response.

My first encounter with young David Newton was in a little stand of hardwoods in eastern Kansas. But that was just a window to some place bigger and wilder. His discovery of a creature that would alter the rest of his life, happened on a little peninsula in the Puget Sound, near the Olympic National Park, in Washington State. 

Mild winters, prodigious rainfall, and a host of other geological oddities allow for places like the famous Hall of Mosses in the Hoh River valley, the deep ravines, and fern-choked glades of the Sel Duc, and the stands of towering, thousand-year-old fir and spruce trees of the Quinault rainforest. These places are both stunningly beautiful, and terrifying. They also happen to be perfect habitats for a very special and rare predator, which has, until recently, remained hidden and unknown. 

As with David, I don’t think the place is done with me. I may go back, someday.

Until then, my new novel, The Tree of Life, is written! I now know the destiny of the boy I met in the woods. I know much more about the mysterious organism he encountered under that tree, and the very powerful forces that protect her species. Most importantly, I’ve seen what all of these imply for our own species. Let me tell you, folks. It doesn’t look so good for us. 

You can read it, if you want, and decide for yourself. If you enjoyed Tanner’s Glen, if you were moved by Noah Weismann’s confused admixture of terror and desire, pain and lust and (possibly) salvation through suffering, if you were fascinated by the creature who brought it all upon him, then I think you’ll really enjoy The Tree of Life.

I have work to do yet, to put this novel in its final, finished form, but with luck, we’ll all have something in our hands this summer.

Stay tuned. 

Wednesday, February 17, 2024