Fair winds to Elana Gomel’s oneiric dark fantasy Dreaming the Dark, launching today –on Imbolc, Brigid’s Day, the goddess of fire, smithing, and poetry. Seamlessly fusing Inuit dream magic with contemporary survivor guilt, Dreaming the Dark tells of a haunting and dangerous leakage between worlds where dreams (and nightmares) can become real. The story’s premise:
The bodies of the People are asleep in the frozen winter ground, while their spirits wander in the dreamlands. But what emerges in the spring from the winter houses is not always human. Kua, a reluctant shaman, cursed with the other-sight that allows her to see the monstrous powers ruling her world, is trying to defend her family from the Tupilak – a soul-stealer and a body-devourer. Meanwhile, as a cruise ship is pushing deeper into the beauty and terror of the North, Oleg, a tech entrepreneur, is beginning to see the same visions that drove his late wife to madness and suicide…
The lovely cover art is by wide-ranging Alan C. Caum and the haunting photo on it was taken by the author herself. Here’s what fellow fantasist Adam Roberts thought of Dreaming the Dark:
Written with an impressive focus, this is nicely atmospheric fantasy with an unusual focus. // The story is by turns hallucinatory, horrific and magical. The plot turns over neatly and briskly and the imagined world of the novel stays with you when you’re done.
Elana Gomel is the author of five non-fiction books published by Routledge, Macmillan and others, and of numerous articles on subjects ranging from science fiction and fantasy to posthumanism and Victorian literature. She has published more than 30 fantasy and science fiction stories, in such magazines as New Horizons, Bewildering Stories, Timeless Tales, The Singularity, New Realm, Mythic, and The Fantasist; and in anthologies The Apex Book of World SF, People of the Book, Twelve Days of Christmas, among others. Her fantasy novel A Tale of Three Cities was published in 2013.
Dreaming the Dark is available on the Candlemark website as the customary full digital package (fancy PDF, EPub, Mobi) and on Amazon Kindle — DRM-free like all our offerings. It’s the third shuttle of The Reckless imprint, after the interstellar diplomacy of Wisps of Spider Silk and the noir interplanetary sleuthing of Piper Deez. Walk the perilous paths of Dreaming the Dark – but take care not to get lost!
