To promote the forthcoming release of the audiobook edition of A Season of Whispers, I’m currently in the midst of a six-week blog tour around the internet, which kicked off last Friday with a glowing review by Kirkus Reviews.
Some of the stops are spotlights or brief excerpts but the rest feature original content like interviews and reviews. Some of the highlights:
This morning I woke to a very positive write-up of A Season of Whispers from Kirkus Reviews, which calls it, “A slim but delightful tale of terror set in transcendentalist New England.”
It’s with a great deal of satisfaction I can now check off another item on my authorial bucket list: Achieve Kirkus Review.
I ended 2020 with a thump like a human heart under the floorboards with a piece of Poe-inspired flash at Love Letters to Poe.
In low tones he explained his process did not involve nerves at all. Years ago, while working with saw and tourniquet in a blood-soaked Union tent, Coffman formed a notion that amputation only removed the physical extremity. What remained, he believed, was an ethereal limb that couldn’t be sliced away with steel.
“An Incident on Mulberry Street” is set in New Haven but you won’t find the address on any modern map. When North Frontage Street was built (the westbound side of Route 34) over what was Fayette Street, Mulberry Street was truncated into a dead end and, somewhat inexplicably, renamed Scranton Street. Meanwhile the streets around it kept their original names. You can see Mulberry Street on this 1893 map of the city, located just above the words “2nd Ward.”
After the story, editor Sara Crocoll Smith posted a short interview with me, which IIRC is my first published interview as a fiction author. There’s also an audio version of the story.
Over at Goodreads I’ve posted some free bonus content for A Season of Whispers.
I did an extensive amount of historical research for the book, and while writing it I left a trail of breadcrumbs for myself in the margins. If you’re curious about the context of a certain passage or phrase, now you can read those breadcrumbs for yourself.
Goodreads has a feature in which you can share the notes and highlights made on your Kindle with others. You need to link your Kindle and Goodreads accounts to create the notes but once they’re made public, anyone can read them.
I’ve made a bunch of annotations to A Season of Whispers that explain many of the historical and literary references in the story, which you can read here. Don’t worry if you haven’t read the book yet — spoilers are hidden unless you want to see them.
The notes can also be accessed by scrolling down on the book’s Goodreads page to the section labeled Featured Notes & Highlights.
I don’t believe the notes pop up unannounced on your Kindle. You can only read them through Goodreads. They’re free to access and you don’t need a Goodreads account.
And if you have a question that isn’t answered by the current notes, feel free to reach out. I’ll be adding more notes over time.
Connecticut is a geologic hodgepodge. Only the northwestern corner, shown in blue and brown and yellow on the map above, is original to North America. The pink zone on the eastern border and southeastern coast was once part of Africa, while most of the state — the green and ocher areas — was the mud and sediment on the ocean floor between the two continents that was thrown to the surface as the tectonic plates pulled apart. The yellow zone down the middle was a failed rift in Pangaea.
To complicate things, the glaciers of the last ice age stretched from Canada all the way to Long Island Sound, completely blanketing Connecticut and terminating in the berm of rocks we now call Long Island. As they receded, the glaciers left the boulders and stones they had pushed before them, which makes Connecticut soil so notoriously difficult to farm.
The yellow division on the map, called the Newark terrane, is chock full of fossils and dinosaur tracks. At the Dinosaur State Park in Rocky Hill, you can see hundreds of three-toed footprints left by Dilophosaurus, pictured here, or at least a theropod dinosaur very similar to her.
Dilophosaurus wetherilli, CC Heather Kyoht Luterman
The tracks — which crisscross each other, running hither and yon — were discovered on the site in 1968 during construction of a building. Those plans were scrapped and a geodesic dome was built over the spot, where visitors today can admire the tracks from raised walkways. Amazingly, what’s visible is a fraction of the total as scientists left several thousand more tracks buried for preservation’s sake.
I’ve always associated dinosaurs and fossils with the southwest and the northern plains, so I was surprised when I discovered Dinosaur State Park less than an hour from our house. I haven’t been there in years but once upon a time it was a perfect day trip for our pair of dinosaur-obsessed boys, and our visits left, well, an impression on me.
This geologic history is a gold mine for a writer of Gothic fiction. After all, the overriding conceit of the genre is that the past haunts the present — and who’s to say if something from antediluvian epochs, thought long dead and gone, might not whisper in our ears tonight?
I hope you’ve enjoyed this week’s tour through some of the settings and places that influenced my novel A Season of Whispers, which is now available in various ebook formats and as a trade paperback. Thanks for reading!
