MALIK - By Andrew Stadtmauer
Hi all please have a look at my upcoming novel Malik. It is the first instalment in a planned 6 book arc. It has yet to go to the copy-editors so please ignore any spelling or grammatical errors.
A Spiel About the Novel:
A year after his wife killed their children, Ashley (Ash) Jackson is drinking himself to death in the West Australian scrub, drowning in grief and despair. Until a hit-and-run places the mortally injured Elise Bennett and her otherworldly mother, Helen, in his path, giving him a chance at rebirth.
When Elise is snatched from death and healed by the ancient entity known as Malik, Ash is drawn to the isolated homestead they call home. There, he discovers a lush oasis in the scrub. White stone buildings choked in jasmine and lilac, and terraced orchards climbing the valley sides. An Eden grafted into the monochrome bush, beautiful but subtly wrong.
Malik is a guardian and friend to his people, not quite a parasite yet not fully a person, neither God nor demon — he is only Malik. Spread within his chosen, watching and feeling as they do, he has been waiting for Ash and his Elise—the silver-haired child who tells stories of the first cities and of gods who taught the grain to grow as she plays with her dolls—to be ready.
He is drawn into their world where the elderly farmers talk to empty rooms, where the crows watch everything with an uncanny intelligence, and the statue of their missing mother, Lamia, changes in the night.
As Malik's plan blossoms and the cult spreads from the farm into Perth—child by child, family by family—Ash must choose the impossible: lose the family he has found or invite Malik inside.
At 88,000 words, MALIK is a literary speculative fiction novel with dark fantasy elements, set in Western Australia, that explores the weight of grief and the transformative power of love, and asks: Does evil exist for a God? For readers of Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, Hannah Kent's Burial Rites and Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. MALIK stands complete as a self-contained novel, serving as the foundation for a planned six-book series that begins with the words: "…this is her story."
The google doc is here.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-q3pabov6OKTGYN3ryE35e0AVnspZpAp6WQEghdlWrU/edit?usp=sharing
Please let me know what you think.