Winterlong

Author’s Afterword

My concern in Winterlong is the relationship between consciousness and reality, and in particular the way in which an artistic medium may be used to explore the interstices between the objective, waking world and those other, more richly textured and deeply shadowed realms that most of us visit only fleetingly. Winterlong explores these regions through the peculiar sensibility of Wendy Wanders. In Aestival Tide, an independent companion novel, I take a different route: we move outward from the disfigured City to the broader stage of a transmogrified oceanscape, conducted (or kidnapped) by a narrative consciousness that is even more out-of-the-ordinary than Wendy’s.

Wendy, Miss Scarlet, Jane Alopex all appear in Aestival Tide. But the primary narrative is that of Jenny-the-fox, neophyte in an arcane cult whose members live in the ruins of an ancient weather-tracking station in the coastal town of Occis. Jenny is caught up in the ongoing intrigue between the Ascendant hegemony and the Balkhash Commonwealth. She is also increasingly obsessed with what she believes is her crucial role in bringing about the necessary destruction of Occis itself. Aestival Tide, the annual celebration of the summer solstice, brings hundreds of carnival-goers to the former ocean resort—among them Wendy and Scarlet and Jane. There’s a kidnapping, a geneslave insurrection involving the reluctant Miss Scarlet, messianic obsessions and the looming threat of a killer hurricane that has been predicted for over three hundred years. As in Winterlong, I’m using subtexts drawn from Near Eastern mythologies, along with the more familiar elements of the Demeter/Persephone myth, the story of the Magdalene, and even the Biblical tale of Lot’s wife. And I hope that the different narrative structure, alternating between third-person and yet another first-person narrator (a la Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet) will give even more depth and texture to my continuing exploration of the coming of the Magdalene.