EP21: Re-Introducing Apartment

ANNOUNCEMENT: Every now and then, I host a sale, or give my books away for FREE! Until July 15, 2021, you can grab free copy of Apartment by filling out this survey on enhanced ebooks to help me out with some academic research.

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In which I introduce my eerie suspense novella, Apartment, again, after a long hiatus. It's scheduled to launch in 2021, so keep an eye out for more info! Leave me your comments, thoughts, and Qs at my blog, my Twitter, my IG, or my Tumblr.

TRANSCRIPT EXCERPT:

"...So, essentially the story started out as pure suspense. That's all I wanted with this book - a deep, suffocating, lingering feeling of suspense that never quite gets satisfied. As I worked on it more and more, I realized that I could do much more with a book like this, and I took a very literary route. I added layers upon layers to this book, with message after message and theme after theme, and sprinkled it with symbolism galore. There's a lot of peel back with this book, and if you read the book at face-value without really taking the time to mull it over and dig a little deeper, you might find it a completely absurd read - which, to be fair, it is!

The story's main genres are suspense, magical realism, and psychological drama. There's some surrealism in there, but I place that in magical realism. If you don't know what magical realism is, you might be interested in checking out the works of Gabrial Garcia Marquez - I strongly recommend Chronicle of a Death Foretold, which does lend some inspiration to some parts of this book - and to those of Haruki Murakami - especially his book, After Dark, which also inspired me greatly as I wrote this book. Magical realism, to put it briefly, is when magical or extraordinary things happen in books but they're treated as normal happenings. For example, a painting could start talking to a character, and the book would never mention how strange that was, or treat it as anything out of the ordinary at all! It's a really interesting story mechanic, and I had a lot of fun working with it in Apartment.

The book also pays homage to a lot of other works - including Chronicle of a Death Foretold and After Dark. For example, it gives a nod to The Exterminating Angel, a film by Luis Bunuel that makes use of a particularly surrealist form of huis clos.

As for psychological drama, this is where the book can get a bit suffocating. It throws you right into the deep end with its narration, telling the story from the perspectives of each of the three main characters - and their minds are not always the best places to be! It also takes the perspectives of a few other characters throughout the story, and in some places takes on a mysterious perspective that seems to be that of the narrator, or perhaps the apartment building itself. Sometimes, the narration and internal thought processes of the characters almost bleed together, making it difficult to identify what is being shared by who, exactly...."

You can read the full transcript over at my blog! It should be out soon - I've been trying my best to catch up with all the transcripts of the episodes leading up to this one.