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GIVEAWAY!! Blog Tour – Spotlight: The White Forest by Adam McOmber with a guest post from the author
The White Forest
written by Adam McOmber
published by Touchstone
find it here: Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Goodreads
About the book – from Goodreads: Young Jane Silverlake lives with her father at a crumbling family estate on the edge of Hampstead Heath. Jane has a secret—an unexplainable gift that allows her to see the souls of manmade objects—and this talent isolates her from the outside world. Her greatest joy is wandering the wild heath with her neighbors, Madeline and Nathan. But as the friends come of age, their idyll is shattered by the feelings both girls develop for Nathan, and by Nathan’s interest in a cult led by Ariston Day, a charismatic mystic popular with London’s elite. Day encourages his followers to explore dream manipulation, with the goal of discovering a new virtual reality, a place he calls the Empyrean.
A year later, Nathan has vanished, and the famed Inspector Vidocq arrives in London to untangle the events that led up to Nathan’s disappearance. As a sinister truth emerges, Jane realizes she must discover the origins of her talent and use it to find Nathan herself, before it’s too late.
And now Every Free Chance Book Reviews would like to welcome Adam McOmber, the author of The White Forest, to the blog today. He has written a guest post about the concept of “imagined worlds” for our readers today!
When I write a piece of fiction, one of the things that matters to me most—aside from creating strong believable characters—is the invention of interestingly imagined worlds. I want to create spaces that are immersive for readers and make them feel like they have literally been transported to a new and fantastic place. As a reader, I truly appreciate when an author is able to create these sorts of dreams, so I strive to do this myself whenever possible.
There are a number of imagined worlds and spaces in my debut novel The White Forest.
The first such imagined environment would be nineteenth century London itself. This may not seem like an “imagined” world, yet for me it was. I researched the period thoroughly and then used that research to paint a version of Victorian London layered with enough wonders and special effects to grab the reader’s attention and pull him or her off into this other time.
There is also the immersive space called the Theater of Provocation. The theater is in an underground chamber in Southwark, and it’s here that our antagonist, the cult leader Ariston Day, holds court with his Fetches. The Fetches themselves are young men from wealthy families who have been drawn into a life of spiritual debauchery by Day and his teachings. For Day’s theater I wanted something that seemed truly uncanny, and so I came up with the idea of the “hidden forest.” Ariston Day and his Fetches have created an entire underground forest beneath London, complete with artificial trees, a painted sky with pieces of glass for stars, and a strange pool where Day sits and contemplates the next step in his plan. Bringing my main character, Jane Silverlake, into the hidden forest, and allowing her to see it for the first time was a great moment for me as writer. The forest was sinister but also beautiful in its own way.
That brings me to the final imagined world in the novel which is the White Forest itself. I don’t want to give too much away here because I want readers to experience the forest, for the first time, in the pages of the novel. But I will say that creating the White Forest was one of the most difficult tasks I’ve even given myself as a writer. Entering that ethereal domain is the culmination of so much for Jane Silverlake. In order to write about it, I had to allow my mind to drift to places its never gone before. I imagined myself opening outward and collecting strange images from the universe. I think that I succeeded in creating something that feels truly otherworldly in The White Forest, and I’m excited for my readers to get lost in the dream of it.
About the author: Adam McOmber’s novel, The White Forest, will be published by Touchstone, an imprint of Simon and Schuster, in September 2012. He is also the author of a book of short stories, This New & Poisonous Air(BOA Editions, 2011). His work has appeared in Conjunctions, StoryQuarterl
find Mr. McOmber here: web, Twitter
A giveaway from Shane at Itching For Books (the blog tour organizer)!
Happy reading wherever you are and whenever you get a free chance!!!
2 Comments
by Shane
Awesome post!
Thanks for participating.
by The Every Free Chance Reader
It was my pleasure, Shane!