Carv's Thinky Blog I'm an author with a focus on satirical science fiction.

27Oct/090

Dramatis Personae

Okay, so I have a confession to make: There is no Zack Heath. Or rather, there are hundreds of Zack Heaths out there--I even know one in California--but the "Zack Heath" introduced below bears no relation to any of them. He's a resident of "Sugar Roses, Oklahoma," the focal point of my novel, Lightfall. About a year before I wrote Lightfall, I read a great book called The Thin Place by Kathryn Davis, in which a supernatural mystery is told from the shifting perspectives of seemingly dozens of characters, including children, small animals, and lichen. One of my goals for Lightfall was to emulate Ms. Davis's soaring point of view. Consequently, you'll meet a broad sample of Sugar Roses; but as I can't say I wield Ms. Davis's effortless genius, a few readers got lost in the crowd. The publishers and I decided to add a quick character intro, which I'm reproducing for you below. Consider this a free sneak peek at the first page of the book!

THE LIGHTFALL IS COMING

Sugar Roses, Oklahoma, population eighteen thousand: a sleepy, conservative college town known—though not widely—for its Christian infotainment company, Saving Grace, and a misguided police prosecution. Nothing much ever happened here worth knowing about…until now. Sugar Roses is about to become a flashpoint for the prophesied End of the World.

Meet the eyewitnesses:

Shay Veracruz—a frustrated customer service rep at Saving Grace, widowed mother to four-year-old Lacey.

Zack Heath—a theatre professor at Southern Oklahoma State University; currently sleeping with Shay…and a number of his students.

Buddy Sims—a mentally retarded adult paperboy who converses with his own personal Jesus.

Amanda Quinlan—an angst-ridden nineteen-year-old blogger, who shelves books at the Sugar Roses library while fretting she may be pregnant.

Scott Glass—local boy made good, a Hollywood screenwriter come home to write about the Sugar Roses police department.

Phillip Mars—gay book department manager at Bayeux Books, Music and Video.

And Danny Murcheson—a redneck, domestic beer enthusiast, and avenger-in-training who takes orders from a bloodthirsty Voice in his head.

“This is our Apocalypse,” Amanda writes. “Tell me you can’t feel it coming. Does anyone hear me calling for help?” Together this cross section of America’s Bible Belt will face a series of unprecedented catastrophes. Are these events truly supernatural? Do they presage the foretold Apocalypse? And who will be moral and strong enough to survive? Only one thing is certain as we begin Earth’s final story:

The endgame has already begun.

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