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A New Kind of Conflict
Scorpion Knight follows a battle-scarred former knight whose dream of a peaceful ranching life is threatened by political intrigue, dangerous loyalties, and a turbulent empire that refuses to release him from his past. What was the inspiration for your story?
As with all my stories and characters, there is no direct inspiration other than ideas I want to explore. The idea behind Scorpion Knight is a man, the main character Amos Kern, who has been through figurative Hell – he started as a young, naïve man and came of age, or rather was forged, in a war in one of the harshest places you can imagine. That kind of thing ages a man rapidly. In that regard, some inspiration was drawn from young Marines who served in Afghanistan and Iraq (I used to be a journalist, and covered the Afghan conflict). But what becomes of a man like this when the conflict, or his time involved in it, ends? And that’s Amos Kern’s situation. Obviously, he wants a peaceful life. I cannot imagine a life more peaceful than working with the land and animals in some fashion (which is my life when not writing). But the real world is not so simple nor accommodating—it is a hard struggle to achieve one’s dreams, especially the dreams worth having. And that’s Amos Kern’s story. And those difficult events he must overcome are part of the larger story unfolding in the Mountain Lords world. But overcoming them, surviving the storm, as it were, may mean going through the storm. So where Amos Kern wanted to find peace after his time in service, he faces yet more conflict, a new kind of conflict, before he can have his peace. And sadly, there is no guarantee that he will find his peace—the real world often has different plans for us than what we hoped.
Amos’s survival at Baldy Fortress has left him with painful memories and complicated relationships. How do these experiences influence his understanding of loyalty, courage, and freedom?
Amos Kern entered service as a young, naive man (in his teens), fresh off the farm and with precious little worldly experience. And he was thrust into a conflict in the desert, a harsh, unforgiving place, against an enemy likewise forged in the desert. During his time there, as part of his survival, he formed strong bonds with other, more experienced men—a brotherhood of life lived rather than blood. In that horrible, unendingly hostile situation, he grew and aged quickly by necessity. So when Baldy Fortress fell, he lost his home, his brothers, and all that he had known and come to rely on. So he is not only alone, but he has lost everything that gave him meaning. That’s a hard place to be, but he must survive all the same. Still, the experience has shaped Amos Kern so that he truly understands what it means to give your word and then stand by it, and to stand by another person, and that makes him a better man for the next stage of his life and the next tasks required of him (which is the journey of Scorpion Knight). He had taken an oath of honor, dedication, and loyalty at the beginning of his long military training, but by the end of the crucible of the desert, he knows what those words mean, and he knows what it is like when they are returned by others.
The Mountain Empire blends medieval traditions with a distinctly Western frontier atmosphere. What drew you to this combination, and how did it shape your world-building?
When I got started writing novels, I heard a lot of advice: of ‘write what you know’. Okay, I’ll go with that, I said. I have lived and worked in the American West most of my life. My great- grandparents were pioneer settlers traveling in a covered wagon to a land still wild and opening up where people were still afraid of a Comanche attack, and my grandmother was a little girl in the back of that wagon. For three generations, my family lived and worked on the Western frontier, and I grew up in that heritage. It’s my roots. As for the medieval element, I’d always been interested in knights and castles as a boy, like many young boys, and from the age of six I grew up reading medieval fantasy like Terry Brooks, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Robert E. Howard. So I knew and loved that genre well. That’s how I got started with this fusion of classic medieval with Western frontier. In my stories, you’ll see knights and desperados, swords and lariats, walled villages and Indian tribes with tipis, castles and cattle drives, kings and cattle barons, and, like my life, they are harmoniously fused together in such a way that it seems natural. And I like to believe it gives a fresh spin on both the Western genre and the Fantasy genre.
With political rivalries, religious institutions, and hints of prophecy shaping the story. How did you balance these larger forces against Amos’s desire to control his own destiny?
The people of the Western frontier, where I grew up, have always been independent and self- reliant. Their own lives and families come first, and society and its institutions come… somewhere down the list below their favorite horse. In fact, society’s institutions are a hindrance to the lives of the people of the Western frontier who just want to live in peace. And that’s not only the disposition of Amos Kern but is the cultural mindset of the world he lives in. So that creates this teetering imbalance and tension between people and their desire for independence, and the powers of society that seek to control them. For the touch of prophecy/spiritualism, there has always been that in people’s lives, more so in the lives of people in the wilderness. That can sometimes be a guiding element in their lives, or sometimes a more forceful element. It’s rare, and not unique to Amos Kern, and that helps with his decision-making process when prophecy comes to him. Other characters are aware of this spiritual reality, how it works, and can thus offer their insight. Otherwise, Amos would be hard-pressed to understand what he’s supposed to do with prophetic visions, and which way to turn in his life. And we, the readers, would have a hard time accepting the decisions and actions made. Amos still has the agency to turn left or right, but he’s receptive to and responsible for what a higher spiritual power is trying to show him for his betterment. Again, it’s a teetering balance, a tension, but now between a mortal man and the eternal, the sacred and the profane.
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the works of award winning, highly acclaimed author Avery Christy. The Scorpion Knight is the first story in this spinoff series set in the universe of his award winning Mountain Lords series.
Former commoner knight Amos Kern is the only survivor of the Baldy Fortress massacre.
He has traveled to Surigard to pay his respects to the family of a good comrade who died
in that battle. From there he intends to travel to distant Azalon to claim land to run
cattle, hopefully with his brother, Daros.
But he could not anticipate having a traveling
companion, Rolana, who also desires to travel to Azalon to search for her brother, who
left to be a mercenary in the Southern Campaigns but has not been heard from in several
years.
Nor could he anticipate being hunted by a greedy prison warden intent on
killing and robbing him. And never could he anticipate Daros, working as a soldier
for a local lord, becoming embroiled in the rising violence that will lead to the
War of Three Crowns.
If ever there was a time to get away to Azalon, this is it, but Amos may be too late as
he and his companions are pulled in as battle lines are drawn. Will they
escape the coming war or will their dreams of family and a new home be lost?
Character-Driven Writer
Cooking Up Magick follows a halfling chef’s culinary explorations through Erdea, a world shaped by ancient magick, layered history, and the practical challenges of travel. Where did the idea behind this story come from?
The first germ of an idea for this story came while I was playing D&D with friends. I wanted to explore a game where people learned to use magick from scratch. In D&D, you start at level one already knowing how your abilities work, but I wanted to know what it would feel like to suddenly develop magick with no warning, no idea it was even possible. I imagined colorful sparks like static electricity, hair floating as power charged through the body. I thought it would be fun to play a halfling who suddenly develops this ability. Unfortunately, COVID interrupted my plans, and we all scattered. The idea wouldn’t stop cooking in my brain, so I started writing.
Shortly before the pandemic, my husband passed away. He loved to cook and had once wanted to be a chef himself, but unfortunately never got that opportunity. So my halfling, Paisley Dell, became a chef because of him. So much of him lives in these characters, in little quirks and interests. He was my cinnamon-roll softie, and Gunur Yurg carries that part of him. The whole book is my ode to him. Writing him into these characters was my catharsis.
How much thought went into designing the roads, terrain, transportation systems, and settlements?
A lot. So much thought. Many times throughout my rewrites, I discovered myself doing the equivalent of algebra. I owe an apology to my teacher for thinking word problems were a waste of time. Trying to figure out how fast the various parties were going, how many miles they had to go, how many days it would take each to get where they were going. And then, of course, how that changed whether they were all walking, being carried, or had horses, and what days they actually started their journeys in relation to each other.
The settlements didn’t require the mental gymnastics that traveling did! I did a lot of research on castles, villages, farming, warfare, and so on from about the 1200-1500’s so that I could convey the proper fantasy flavor. Because it’s fantasy, and my book is populated with different races, I tried to keep the technology developed somewhat consistently, yet with cultural variations.
Do you enjoy the problem-solving side of adventure stories as much as the action itself?
Absolutely. Action helps keep the pace fast and fun. But delving into the problems and “what do we do now” questions gives us glimpses into our characters’ minds, how they think, why they think that way, how they solve problems. I am a very character-driven writer, so I enjoy that part immensely.
Can you give us a glimpse inside Book 2 of the Dell Chronicles? Where will it take readers?
Paisley and her friends travel to Zeldara and meet with Lera Telanir, the king of the Dark Elves. Paisley learns more about her magick, and we get a spotlight more on Leel and Idari. Those two characters didn’t get a lot of page time in book one, and will get more in book two. The group also gets to meet a dragon or two.
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Paisley Dell is a halfling chef with a simple dream: learn to cook foreign cuisines and bring warmth to the world one meal at a time. But her peaceful culinary quest derails the moment she stumbles upon a talking cat, meets a dragon in disguise, and unleashes magick no one has wielded in five centuries. Now an ancient sorcerer wants her dead.
Paisley and her new friends—a pair of loyal dwarves, a wandering high elf, and an honorable half orc who believes their fates are intertwined—race against the shadow of a rising war.
As the sorcerer’s assassin draws closer, Paisley must navigate sieges, secrets, and her bewildering new powers… all while trying to protect the people she loves.
She never asked to be a hero. She just wanted to cook—but Cooking Up Magick is exactly what destiny’s recipe calls for.
Legends and Lattes meets The Lord of the Rings. Cozy fantasy warmth meets epic fantasy stakes in a story where kindness, love, and community aren’t weaknesses to overcome, but the very strengths that win wars.Found Family
Strong Female Protagonist
Characters You Want to Hang Out With
Culinary Fantasy
Secretive Cat Companion
Slow Burn Romance
Sorcerer Villain
Dragons, Wyverns, & Murdercats, Oh My!
Cooking Up Magick: The Dell Chronicles Book One
Give me a fantasy world with questionable maps, ancient infrastructure, and people arguing over how to get somewhere, and you’ve got my attention. HL Bernabe’s Cooking Up Magick understands the entertainment value of a journey that requires actual planning. Roads matter. Terrain matters. So do supplies, transportation, and the irritating fact that everyone travels at a different speed. Paisley Dell’s wish to explore the world’s cuisines provides an appealing starting point, but what caught my interest was how thoroughly Bernabe thinks through the world she’ll have to cross. Erdea has the accumulated history of a place people have been building, fighting over, and making themselves comfortable in for centuries. Even its old magick has practical consequences for the people living there now.
I particularly enjoyed the attention to work and expertise. Botany, medicine, languages, agriculture, and military strategy all get their moment, and knowledge can change the possibilities of a scene. Buckley’s fascination with plants is a good example of how a character’s profession becomes part of the adventure’s machinery. Bernabe also explores how societies decide which talents deserve respect and who’s allowed to pursue them. Expectations around gender, ancestry, and family status influence people’s choices, sometimes painfully. Those pressures give the different cultures something more substantial than distinctive clothing or unfamiliar names. You start to understand what it would feel like to grow up inside their rules. The pronunciation guide and glossary are useful additions for readers who enjoy examining the details of an invented world.
The approach to magick held my interest, too. Learning involves experimentation, imperfect explanations, physical effort, and the occasional spectacular mistake. There’s something satisfying about watching people work out what an ability does and how to use it responsibly. That same practical curiosity carries into the larger conflict. Leaders have to consider what they know, what they’re guessing, and what they can afford to risk. Bernabe gives these decisions space, so the political and military stakes develop through discussions as well as action. The shifting viewpoints help here: you can follow different interpretations of the same situation and watch uncertainty become a source of tension. There’s a distinctly tabletop-adventure pleasure in seeing a difficult problem approached by people with different skills and incomplete information.
The book’s voice is loose, cheeky, and comfortable being outrageous. Its dialogue includes swearing, rude jokes, and the kind of exasperated remarks people make when a situation has become thoroughly ridiculous. Alongside that humor, Bernabe writes violence with blunt physical detail and takes the consequences seriously. Moving between those registers gives the novel an unruly energy that I found memorable. The descriptive passages also make good use of space, particularly when the setting shifts between open country and the built environment of the dwarven kingdom. As the opening installment of a larger story, it offers plenty for readers who enjoy learning how a fantasy world functions while an adventure gathers momentum. Cooking Up Magick makes the workings of its world as compelling as the dangers waiting inside it.
Pages: 427 | ASIN : B0HC7QPB6K
Science Ends, and Fiction Begins
The Aurora Rift follows an evolutionary anthropologist who is transported through time by a mysterious fracture in the Northern Lights, journeying across civilizations and centuries while searching for a way back to his family. Where did the idea behind this novel come from?
The original idea for The Aurora Rift came from my fascination with two things that have always seemed almost made for each other: history and the unknown.
I have always been intrigued by the Aurora Borealis. We understand much of the science behind the Northern Lights: the interaction between charged particles from the sun and Earth’s magnetic field, but when you actually see photographs or video of the aurora moving across the sky, there is still something mysterious about it. It looks like a curtain separating o ur world from somewhere else. As a writer, I began asking myself a simple question: What if, under exactly the right circumstances, it actually was?
That question eventually became The Aurora Rift.
I didn’t want to write a time-travel story in which the main character simply pushes a button on a machine and selects a date. I wanted time travel to be unpredictable and even frightening. Kyle Richards is an evolutionary anthropologist, so history is something he has spent his life studying. Suddenly, instead of studying the past, he is trapped inside it. Everything he knows academically becomes a tool for survival.
But as the story developed, I realized the novel wasn’t really about time travel. It was about getting home.
Kyle can witness extraordinary civilizations, encounter people we know only from history, and see things that no modern human being was ever meant to see. Yet none of those experiences can replace Samantha and his family. That became the emotional heart of the novel.
It also allowed me to explore another idea that fascinated me: if someone traveled through history, could they truly remain an observer? Even the smallest interaction might change something. A footprint, a carving, a friendship, saving someone’s life, or simply being seen where you shouldn’t exist could potentially leave evidence thousands of years later.
That gave me the foundation for the novel: science, history, adventure, and survival on one side, and family, love, and the desire to get home on the other.
How extensive was your research for the different historical periods?
The research was extensive because I wanted the historical settings to feel like real places rather than backgrounds placed behind the characters.
Kyle moves through periods separated by hundreds or even thousands of years, and every transition required a different kind of research. I looked at geography, climate, clothing, weapons, transportation, food, social structures, warfare, trade routes, belief systems, and the practical realities of everyday survival.
The challenge was that history books often give us the large events kings, battles, migrations, empires, and dates but a novelist also needs the small details. What would Kyle smell when he entered a settlement? What would people be eating? What would he hear? How would strangers react to his clothing, his speech, or his behavior? How far could someone realistically travel in a day? What would constitute wealth? What would make people suspicious of an outsider?
Those details were extremely important to me.
The research became particularly interesting when Kyle’s journey crossed recognizable historical civilizations and figures. I wanted readers who already knew these periods to recognize them, while readers unfamiliar with them could experience history through Kyle’s eyes without feeling as though they were reading a textbook.
My goal wasn’t to put a history lesson inside an adventure novel. It was to make the history part of the adventure.
The research also extended into the science. The Aurora Borealis, geomagnetic disturbances, Earth’s magnetic field, and the possibility of unusual interactions between energy, space, and time gave me a scientific foundation from which I could push into speculation.
That distinction was important to me. I wanted readers to reach a point where established science ends, and fiction begins almost without noticing the transition. Obviously, The Aurora Rift is science fiction, but the best speculative fiction, to me, begins with enough reality that the impossible makes you stop for a moment and think: What if?
How did you handle the tension between historical accuracy and the needs of the adventure?
That was probably one of the most enjoyable challenges of writing the book.
I treated known history as the framework. If an important event occurred at a certain time and place, I didn’t want to casually change it simply because another version would make the scene easier to write. Instead, I tried to place Kyle within the spaces history didn’t record.
History tells us what happened on a large scale, but there are enormous gaps in what we know about individual moments and individual people. Those gaps gave me room to create.
Kyle can witness history without necessarily becoming the reason history happened. He can meet people, influence individuals, survive battles, travel with groups, and leave traces of himself behind while the larger historical record continues moving forward.
Of course, the deeper Kyle travels into the past, the greater the danger becomes that his presence could change something. That tension became part of the story rather than a problem I needed to eliminate.
Kyle gradually realizes that survival itself may alter history.
If he saves one person who was supposed to die, what happens to that person’s descendants? If he introduces an idea before its time, where does that idea eventually lead? If he leaves behind an object or a carving, could an archaeologist thousands of years later discover evidence of a man who could not possibly have been there?
Those questions allowed historical accuracy and science fiction to work together.
There were moments when the needs of the story required imagination, but I tried to make those moments plausible within the historical world surrounding them. I wanted the reader to feel that Kyle was moving through history rather than history rearranging itself conveniently around Kyle.
And sometimes the most dramatic choice was simply to let history remain history. Human history is already filled with extraordinary courage, brutality, discovery, ambition, survival, and tragedy. I didn’t need to reinvent those things. I needed to put Kyle close enough for the reader to experience them.
What would you like readers to remember most about The Aurora Rift?
More than anything, I would like readers to remember that beneath the time travel, historical figures, battles, science, and adventure, The Aurora Rift is a story about family.
Kyle experiences things that most people could never imagine. He crosses civilizations. He sees history alive around him instead of preserved in books and museums. He survives situations where one mistake could kill him centuries before he was ever born.
But through all of it, there is one constant: home.
Samantha and his family are his connection to the person he was before the Rift. The farther he travels through time, the more important that connection becomes.
I also wanted readers to think about time differently after finishing the book. We tend to look at history as something finished and safely behind us. But every person who ever lived experienced their own time as the present. They had families. They worried about tomorrow. They loved people, lost people, fought, survived, hoped, and dreamed without knowing how history would eventually remember or completely forget—them.
Kyle gets the extraordinary opportunity to see that firsthand.
And there is another question beneath the story that becomes increasingly important: If you could travel through history, should you interfere?
It’s easy to say you wouldn’t change anything. It’s much harder when you’re standing in front of someone whose life you might be able to save.
Ultimately, though, I hope readers remember Kyle’s determination to return to his family. He may be traveling across thousands of years, but emotionally he is trying to cross one distance: the distance between himself and home.
To me, that is what The Aurora Rift is really about.
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A Man Out of TimeDr. Kyle Richards thought he was chasing wonder.
An Evolutionary Anthropologist, respected lecturer, martial artist, husband, and father, Kyle journeys to Northern Norway in search of the breathtaking Aurora Borealis and the ancient petroglyphs of Alta. But beneath the dancing northern lights, something impossible happens. A violent geomagnetic phenomenon tears Kyle from the modern world and hurls him across the corridors of time.
What begins as scientific fascination quickly becomes a desperate fight for survival.
Thrown into the Stone Age among primitive hunters, Kyle unknowingly leaves behind clues that will survive for thousands of years. He battles Viking warriors, walks beside Silk Road caravans, witnesses the rise of empires, and survives civilizations most people only read about in history books. Along the way, he encounters moments that forever alter him—including an unforgettable friendship with a young boy who will one day become Genghis Khan and a journey east with Marco Polo toward the legendary court of Kublai Khan.
But every jump through time comes at a cost.
As Kyle struggles to survive brutal landscapes, ancient warfare, and the terrifying instability of the auroral corridor itself, the man he once was slowly begins to disappear beneath scars, grief, and centuries of memory. Meanwhile, back in present-day Pennsylvania, his wife Samantha refuses to give up hope. Alongside archaeologists and scientists searching for answers, she uncovers ancient carvings, unexplained historical anomalies, and evidence suggesting Kyle may still be alive somewhere… in another time.
AURORA RIFT: A Man Out of Time is an epic blend of historical adventure, science, survival, and emotional human drama. Spanning thousands of years of civilization from Stone Age Norway to the Persian Empire of Xerxes, from Viking seas to the vast Mongol world the novel asks a haunting question:
If time itself opened before you… Would you ever truly find your way home again?
Aurora Rift: A Man Out of Time
The Aurora Rift, by Thomas LeBrun, is a time-travel science fiction adventure built around a wonderfully strange idea: the Northern Lights can become a natural fracture in time. Dr. Kyle Richards, an evolutionary anthropologist, martial artist, husband, and father, gets caught beneath an intense aurora in Norway and finds himself thrown thousands of years into the past. From there, the novel becomes a historical science fiction journey through civilizations and centuries, with Kyle repeatedly pulled from one era to another while trying to understand the force that’s moving him and find a path back to his family.
What gives this time travel adventure its personality is the way Kyle experiences history from ground level. He doesn’t simply observe famous periods from a safe distance. He eats with prehistoric hunters, lives among Vikings, crosses the Mongolian steppe, encounters figures such as Temüjin, Attila, Marco Polo, and Kublai Khan, and finds himself surrounded by societies that are completely ordinary to the people living in them. LeBrun spends a lot of time on food, clothing, weapons, shelter, travel, language, and the practical business of staying alive, which gives the historical adventure side of the novel an almost episodic quality. Each new period presents Kyle with the same deceptively difficult problem: how does a modern man survive in another civilization without changing that civilization simply by being there?
The other half of the story belongs to Samantha and the people searching for Kyle in the present, and that thread gives the science fiction more emotional weight. Kyle’s journey might involve geomagnetic storms, temporal corridors, ancient empires, and questions about whether history can be altered, but his motivation stays remarkably personal. He wants to get home. As the jumps accumulate, the most interesting change isn’t technological or historical. It’s Kyle himself. His modern clothes disappear, his appearance changes, his body takes a beating, and centuries of human experience start piling up in his memory. The book gradually turns the idea of being “a man out of time” from a catchy premise into a genuine identity problem. How much history can someone carry and still return to the life he remembers?
As historical science fiction and time travel fiction, The Aurora Rift moves quickly and thinks on a big scale. Its style is direct and visual, with frequent action, survival challenges, historical encounters, and cliffhanger-like transitions that keep pushing Kyle toward the next century. At the same time, there’s a consistent fascination with ordinary human behavior beneath all that history: fear of strangers, respect earned through restraint, generosity between people who share no language, and the importance of family when everything familiar has been stripped away. By the time Kyle’s long journey circles back toward the mystery of the Alta carvings, the novel has connected its opening archaeological puzzle to something much more personal. And its final pages make it clear that the Aurora Rift may have finished one journey while opening the door to another.
Pages: 266 | ASIN : B0H9FVPX3J
Supernatural Event
Out of the Thicket follows the people of Yana who, for over a decade, have had all their twelve-year-old boys vanish on the same night each year; only this year, two boys decide to run, trying to escape their fate. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
One evening, an image popped into my mind unbidden: a man and a woman sitting on the ground facing one another, with a boy between them. I thought, “That’s a strange idea. Maybe I can make a story out of that.” I had to ask, “Who are these people, and why are they sitting like that?” From there, I came up with the ritual surrounding the supernatural event called the Seizing that serves as the backdrop for my story.
What interested you about exploring faith through characters who do not always agree about what they believe or how belief should guide them?
I wanted to write a book that showed the struggle of faith. Jacob, the patriarch from the Bible, is a very important character to me. He wrestled with God and was blessed for it. I wanted to depict people who wrestled with doubt, beliefs, religion, prayer, and God’s silence. I think many books addressing faith make life too clean and easy. I wanted to mirror what faith looks like in the real world through my fantasy.
Yana has developed traditions, sayings, prejudices, religious practices, and rituals around its history. How did you approach creating a culture shaped by generations of fear and loss?
I had a lot of fun creating the world of Out of the Thicket. My starting point was the biblical world of the Old Testament, a place guided by sacred texts, complicated by corrupt religious leaders, and visited by mysterious prophets. A land where miracles happen. But I didn’t want it to read like Bible fan fiction or historical fiction, so I made up new cities, backstories, rituals, and proverbs. I hope the result is a story that arrives in a world that already feels lived in.
What is the next book that you are working on, and when will it be available?
I’m working on a dystopian, three-volume southern gothic tale about truth. Like Out of the Thicket, it contains some elements of magical realism. I’m taking my time with it and have no idea when it will be published.
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One mother, Ramia, refuses to participate in the ritual, which infuriates Hannah, revealing that her motives have more to do with issues surrounding her own son’s untimely death. When Ramia’s son, Hazaq, and his best friend, Bear, try to escape The Seizing by running away, Yana is thrown into a maelstrom of intrigue and doubt.
Featuring a cast of fiercely independent female leads, heartwarming childhood friendships, complex villains, sage prophets, and dubious religious leaders who are caught in an entertaining plot full of twists,
Out of the Thicket is a story about the sacrificial nature of love.
A Sense of Belonging
Tales of New Stenchford follows a scrappy petty criminal navigating a filthy, dangerous, and absurd fantasy city filled with crooks, nobles, monsters, and chaos. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
I was born and raised in Manhattan in the 1970s and ’80s, and for reasons I don’t fully understand, I was always drawn to the city’s underbelly. I explored deserted subway tunnels, decommissioned ship piers, condemned buildings—anywhere with a “Keep Out” sign.
I met all sorts of marginalized people and discovered elaborate worlds hidden away inside the city. Still, it wasn’t any one thing in particular that I was seeking; it was a feeling, a sense of belonging that coaxed me onto buses and under bridges to commune with something I couldn’t describe but knew felt right.
Alongside all of that, I had a family that introduced me to opera, museums, and fine dining. I experienced the world that lived high above the scrappy streets and had to wrestle with the dissonance. I experienced the city on many levels and brought its richness to New Stenchford.
I think it’s fair to say that when you ask about “navigating a filthy, dangerous, and absurd fantasy city filled with crooks, nobles, monsters, and chaos,” you might be referring to New Stenchford, but you could just as easily be talking about my hometown.
Rizzle is treated as an outcast by many people, yet he seems perfectly at home in the city’s streets. What does his relationship with New Stenchford reveal about his character?
The book had to begin with Rizzle. It had to start with something base and real, not a square-jawed hero with wavy blond hair.
Rizzle is a dirty little scoundrel, but he has a big heart, not unlike Ratso Rizzo from Midnight Cowboy. Rizzle is pragmatic and can bend his morals to fit whatever situation he might find himself in, but he is not a sociopath. He has empathy for his fellow city dwellers, even if sometimes he uses it to con them.
People look down on Rizzle, but he doesn’t need their approval; he has the city. New Stenchford keeps him warm, fed, and protected, even if those things require a bit of thievery and stealth to acquire.
Rizzle can see the rich living high on the hog, but he knows their secrets. He knows who is addicted to what and who is cheating with whose wife. It gives Rizzle a no-nonsense point of view that allows him to see the world clearly.
The novel contains numerous intersecting plots, including political corruption, organized crime, forbidden romance, religious conspiracies, curses, and magical disasters. How did you approach bringing those seemingly unrelated threads together?
Believe it or not, when I sat down to write the book, I had nothing but a cluster of characters and locations. I didn’t have a plot, a theme, or an outline.
I just sat down one afternoon and started writing the book chronologically, moving from one scene to the next without knowing anything about where I was going.
The resulting book is a little scattered, but I don’t think I could have written it any other way. I needed to let the characters and situations dictate what happened next; otherwise, I think it would have felt stale.
It wasn’t until I was more than halfway through the book that I started jotting down notes and making plans. It wasn’t until I reached the last chapter that I knew how the book ended.
If you could spend one day in New Stenchford, where would you go—and what would you do your best to avoid?
The answer to both of these questions is one place: the Last Resort. It is probably the smelliest, most dangerous place in town, but that’s where all the action is. It’s a dirt-floor bar down by the Pue River near the center of town. In a later book, I explain that although the Last Resort has windows, sunlight does not come through them for fear of what it might illuminate.
You don’t know what might happen in that rundown little shack, but that’s what makes it interesting. Yes, it’s possible you might lose a limb or end up with vomit in your hair, but you won’t be bored. The palace will no doubt be a predictable pageant of arrogance and sycophancy, and the inns will be crowded and hot, but in the Last Resort, you might see something truly novel. It might be something you wish you had never seen at all, but it won’t be boring.
Tales of New Stenchford is the first in the New Stenchford Series. There are ten books in the series. A new one will be published approximately every five months.
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Queen Strongbottom, brave of heart, strong of bottom, runs the place, but has no idea that Wanda Stickybuns, the secret mistress of Queen Strongbottom’s father Gluteus, is plotting to overthrow the King and install her illegitimate two-headed son on the throne.
If you choose to come and see for yourself you’ll want to keep a close eye on your belongings and wash your hands thoroughly when you get home, if you get home.
Tales of New Stenchford
Tales of New Stenchford, by Ben Rubin, is a sprawling comic fantasy built around a city that feels equal parts medieval kingdom, pop-culture junk drawer, political farce, and fever dream. The book follows a large cast, but Rizzle the Weasel serves as its scruffy gravitational center. He’s a homeless petty criminal who knows the city’s alleys, businesses, crooks, nobles, and monsters better than almost anyone. Early on, Rubin captures his relationship with New Stenchford nicely: while the citizens treat Rizzle as someone to avoid, “the streets themselves seemed to welcome him.” That idea ends up fitting the whole novel. Rizzle belongs to this filthy, dangerous, ridiculous place because he’s every bit as resourceful and morally flexible as the city itself.
The book’s biggest pleasure is its relentless world-building. New Stenchford is crowded with witches, orcs, trolls, vampires, talking spiders, cursed hybrids, corrupt officials, crime families, brothels, breweries, temples, sausage shops, and fountains nobody should drink from. Rubin keeps adding jokes at the level of names, businesses, creatures, historical references, and background details, so even a walk across town can become a string of comic discoveries. Characters named Janet Jackson, Sid the Vicious, Taylor the Swift, Colonel Mustard, and George R. R. Martin coexist with creations like snittens, crabbits, Sharkaroos, and Camoostapuses. The references are usually folded into the fantasy world, which gives the setting its peculiar personality. The result feels like a place that has been allowed to grow wildly in every direction.
Underneath all that silliness, there’s a surprisingly elaborate collection of intersecting stories. A doomed brewery, a forbidden romance between Ananas and Piña, Michael Jackson’s lycanthropy, Grimenail’s secret religious conspiracy, the Followers of Tim, a philosophical giant spider named Cilantro, Hernia’s curses, organized crime, political corruption, and an increasingly unstable monarchy all begin as separate threads and gradually crash into one another. The novel’s episodic structure gives Rubin room to wander, and that abundance is both part of its charm and occasionally a source of drag. Some side stories and extended bits temporarily bury the larger plot, but the payoff is that New Stenchford starts to feel populated. By the time the palace falls and Rizzle accidentally emerges from the rubble wearing the queen’s crown, the joke works because the book has spent so much time establishing how this society operates.
Rubin’s humor is broad, profane, pun-heavy, frequently grotesque, and committed to escalation. Deaths can be gruesome, sex jokes can get cheerfully tasteless, and philosophical quotations may turn up in the mouth of a thirty-foot spider that’s considering eating somebody. The political satire becomes especially funny once Rizzle is mistaken for a divinely appointed ruler. At his coronation, he offers the crowd a mangled bit of motivational rhetoric: “This’ll be one uh dem real win-win type deals fer all uh us.” It’s a good example of the book’s method. Lofty institutions keep colliding with characters who are venal, confused, horny, hungry, frightened, or simply trying to get through the day. Even when the jokes are absurd, the selfishness, incompetence, ambition, and accidental consequences underneath them are recognizable.
What I liked most about Tales of New Stenchford is the sense that the book genuinely enjoys its own world. It keeps finding another door to open, another resident to introduce, and another ridiculous consequence to set loose. The ending makes that especially clear. After revolutions, curses, magical disasters, political reshuffling, and a brief hope that things might settle down, Rizzle discovers that another enormous problem is literally stomping toward him, and his response is simply, “Oh no.” It’s an apt final note for a novel whose basic rhythm is order, chaos, temporary recovery, and fresh chaos. Tales of New Stenchford is a rowdy ensemble fantasy satire with an unusually dense comic world, and its strongest quality is the sheer enthusiasm with which it keeps that world moving.
Pages: 253 | ASIN : B0H7DGGBVP
