Glossolalia

 

 

Glossolalia

by e rathke

GENRE:   Fantasy

“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.

Excerpt:

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.

About the Author:

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.

Q&A With the Author
What did you enjoy most about writing this book?

For me, the joy of discovery always keeps me going. I know some writers meticulously plot and plan what’s going to happen and where the novel’s heading. I have friends, even, who write conversations with their characters in order to understand them before they begin writing their novels. 

    I don’t do anything like this. I just open up the word document and start running with the ideas and the world that’s slowly come together inside me over weeks or months or years. When I begin writing something, it’s a bit like a dam breaking. The exhilaration and novelty of each new novel keeps me sprinting forward, delighting in what I find. 

    And so it was with Glossolalia. The world and society of this village at the edge of the world came to me well before I sat down to write anything, but the characters and the narrative itself came together as I began writing. My favorite part of this novel may be the Mountain Girls and the nameless ones. And, of course, Ineluki.

    But you’ll meet them soon enough so I’ll say no more.

Do you have any other books you are working on that you can tell us about?

My good friends J David Osborne and Kelby Losack are both publishing cyberpunk novels at Broken River Books on December 1st and I thought I’d get in on the fun, so now I’m having the time of my life flying by the seat of my pants to get this done in time for December 1st. I’m actually writing it live in google docs, so any curious readers can jump in and find me actively writing here and there. You can click the link right here to go there.

    The first draft will happen in google docs and that’ll be available for people to read, but this may differ a lot or a little from the final version. It’s called Howl. Takes a pretty unusual path into a cyberpunk setting, but I’ll let the readers sort that out.

Can you tell us about what you have planned for the future?

Glossolalia launched in September. Sing, Behemoth, Sing, my collaborative novel with Kyle Muntz under the name KE Wolfe, came out in October. Howl is coming out December 1st. And then, under KE Wolfe, we’ll be releasing a Star Trek-esque series made of discrete adventures. The first four episodes are coming seasonally next year.

    Along with that, I have a few more collaborative novels with different people coming out under the name Coyote Black and, of course, some more novels coming out under my own name, e rathke.

    As always, you can follow along for updates at radicaledward.substack.com where I’ll also be serializing a novel starting in 2023.

How long have you been writing?

Like sad kids everywhere and forever, I wrote poetry when I was a teenager so I suppose that’s when I began, but I didn’t really start writing prose until I was in college and didn’t write my first novel until 2010. Since then, I’ve written a lot of novels.

    So I’d say twelve years ago is as good a place to start with answering this question, though I could also say, like, twenty years ago. 

Anything more you would like to say to your readers and fans?

Thank you for indulging me. And if my particular version of fiction isn’t your thing, you may still enjoy the personal essays I publish at radicaledward.substack.com. I’ve been publishing one to three essays per week since September of 2021. They range in topic from videogames to making hot sauce to listening to music with my son to the week I spent at a hospital in Korea, and on and on.

Amazon Link: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0BCDVFZHM/

Goodreads Link: 

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

GIVEAWAY

e rathke will be awarding a $50 Amazon or Barnes and Noble GC to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour.

a Rafflecopter giveaway