Glossolalia by e rathke - Book Tour - Guest Post - Giveaway - Enter Daily!

Hi, lovelies!!  It gives me great pleasure today to host e rathke and his new book, “Glossolalia,” here on FAB!!  For other stops on his Goddess Fish Promotions Book Tour, please click on the banner above or any of the images in this post.

Be sure to make it to the end of this post to enter to win a $50 Amazon OR Barnes and Noble Gift Card!!!  Also, come back daily to interact with e rathke and to increase your chances of winning!!

Thanks for stopping by!!  Wishing you all lots of good luck in this fabulous giveaway!!

Glossolalia

by e rathke

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GENRE:   Fantasy

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BLURB:

“My name is Ineluki. I come from past the mountains and ice. It took me many days to reach here. All I know are dead. Will you take me in?”

And so begins a calamitous year at the edge of the world.

Chief for the year, Aukul's life has never been better. His people respect him, he spends his nights with the love of his life, and his skills as a butcher and chef improve every day. Then Ineluki, a young stranger, wanders into town with nothing but an empty book. He begins telling stories of the world beyond the one they know. His stories challenge their reality and lead to a summer of unprecedented disasters.

One by one, the villagers begin dancing. Dancing tirelessly, as if in a trance, until they die. Believing Ineluki is to blame, Aukul confronts him on the worst night of his life.

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EXCERPT ONE:

I

Umok was the first to see the boy. There was nothing special about the boy except that he wasn’t one of us and didn’t seem to be an Uummanuq. Not that anyone really knew, then, what the Uummanuq looked like. Not really. But he was too tall to be one of them and much too short to be one of us. Maybe strangest of all, he was dressed as a woman. One of ours, not the Uummanuq women, assuming anyone knew, then, what the Uummanuq looked like when they weren’t smashing our homes down. But he wore a loose, open vest, his trousers tight and reaching just past his knees. In his hands, a hidebound book.

It was a clear day, just past spring, and though the edge of the world is known for its deathly cold, our summers are quite warm. Warm enough to wade out into the sea and gather crabs or lobster. Or even to swim out to where the leviathans burst through the water, spraying the skies with their misted breath.

Umok was so distracted by the boy that she dropped her arm, accidentally flinging her gyrfalcon, Feo, to the ground. When Feo shrieked the way she does, the boy turned to Umok and smiled a big toothy grin. To hear Umok tell it later, the boy had fangs like a wolf and eyes that glowed with menace.

We’re not prone to superstition, but much changed that summer and especially come winter, when the days last barely a blink and the nameless ones call out to us in the long night, and mothers wake to missing children, never to be seen again.

But the boy didn’t stop when he saw Umok. It was like he had a set destination. Like he knew where we were. And maybe that’s the most shocking of all. That he just wandered out from the dark green summer mountains and walked right to our little village at the edge of the world with nothing but the clothes he was wearing, an empty book, and a mouthful of words that would change the shape of all our lives.

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GUEST POST:

Worldbuilding in Glossolalia

An idea. That’s where a novel always begins. Whether the idea is a simple concept or a character, a setting or a specific image or scene, all that follows comes out of this singular seed that gets watered by time, experience, and the person you are when you sit down at your keyboard.

I have never had a shortage of ideas. Only of time. The ideas keep coming, keep flowing, whether I’m ready for them or not. But because of the many constraints on my time—family, friends, work, and on and on endlessly—I find that that singular seed often melts into another seed and then another, and, well, maybe five more. All these different ideas that seemed so distinct slosh around in the basin of my skull, until they mix and become one Big Idea.

And so it was with Glossolalia.

I had been staring at pictures of Greenland for several days. I wanted to go there before all the glaciers melt. Want to witness what will one day be forever gone. Staring at this otherworldly beauty where oceans meets mountain meets sky, I began peopling imaginary worlds. An isolated village at the edge of the world. A people defined by their position between mountains and ocean and sky.

In this way, pictures of Greenland turned into research on Inuit culture, from the culinary to the theological. Along with that, I was reading the Tao Te Ching the way I’ve always been reading the Tao Te Ching since I first discovered it in a library when I was sixteen. Thoughts of leadership, of social organization, rose to the surface and melded with this isolated place, these isolated people at the edge of the world.

Of course, an invented culture isn’t a book. It’s not even a story. When I began to wonder what must happen there, who these people are and what their lives must be, I remembered these strange dancing plagues that used to happen in Europe. Unexplainably, someone would begin dancing. This someone would become a handful would become a dozen and then a dozen more. Some of them would dance themselves to death. And then, as strangely as it began, the dancing simply stopped.

Why and how?

Well, we don’t know. We’ll never know. But what might these people think when such a calamitous strangeness falls upon them?

I needed a stranger to come to town. And if you’re going to have a stranger come to town, you may as well have a strange and mysterious artefact with them. Since I’d been reading about the Voynich manuscript and always wanted a place to put such a thing, this town at the edge of the world seemed as good a place as any.

Thus and so, Ineluki was born.

When I sat down to write Glossolalia, all these seemingly disparate concepts and ideas came together and became the novel now available for all of you.

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AUTHOR BIO:

e rathke writes about books and games at radicaledward.substack.com. A finalist for the 2022 Baen Fantasy Adventure Award, he is the author of Glossolalia and several other forthcoming novellas. His short fiction will appear in Queer Tales of Monumental Invention, Mysterion Magazine, and elsewhere.

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CONNECT WITH E RATHKE:

Website:

https://radicaledward.substack.com

Goodreads Author Page:

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/22680533.E_Rathke

Goodreads Book Page:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61961144-glossolalia-or-don-t-scream-it-on-the-mountain

Amazon Author Page:

https://amzn.to/3VRaNO2

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AMAZON BOOK BUY LINKS:

Amazon US Kindle eBook:

https://amzn.to/3VKSUR0

Amazon US Paperback:

https://amzn.to/3TM4Wb7

Amazon US Audiobook:

https://amzn.to/3MTTY12

Amazon CA Kindle eBook:

https://www.amazon.ca/Glossolalia-dont-scream-mountain-rathke-ebook/dp/B0BCDVFZHM

Amazon CA Paperback:

https://www.amazon.ca/Glossolalia-dont-scream-mountain-rathke/dp/B0BGCM31ZB

Amazon CA Audiobook:

https://www.amazon.ca/Audible-Glossolalia-Dont-Scream-Mountain/dp/B0BFZNMCNP

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GIVEAWAY INFO:

e rathke will be awarding a $50 Amazon OR Barnes and Noble Gift Card (Winner’s Choice!!!) to a randomly drawn winner via Rafflecopter during the tour.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

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This contest is sponsored by a third party. Fabulous and Brunette is a registered host of Goddess Fish Promotions.  Prizes are given away by the sponsors and not Fabulous and Brunette. The featured author and Goddess Fish Promotions are solely responsible for the giveaway prize.