Readers have asked questions about my upcoming book, The Core. Through a series of posts, I hope to help my readers understand the purpose and nature of the book and my work in general
I write speculative fiction, at least that where I start. A large part of that is playing with form in order to manipulate the reader, but it’s more than that. The idea of fragmentation is the foundation of THE CORE.
The novel is not about one person, although it does roughly follow the life of Alex, a recruiter for a cult. At the beginning, we meet people that are entering the Core, people Alex is bringing into the Core. As the novel progresses, the stories move to those that have been in the Core for a short while. Alex is in all the stories, in a way, and the novel ends as Alex’s story ends, through the stories of those that have made the Core what it is. All of these feel separate because they have to. Like life, there is rarely order or a singularity of perspective.
When I was in grad school I read Deleuze and Guattari’s “A Thousand Plateaus.”
What Deleuze is probably best known for is the notion of the rhizome. The over simplified idea (you gotta be careful with Deleuzians, they’re a feisty bunch) is that life erupts, not in a logical fashion, but in unexpected ways, and that the order we have in life (notions of space, identity, time, causality, life itself…) is chaos contained within constructs of order, the level of certainty we attempt to put on life eluding us, always.
Essentially, because I was writing about people surrounding a cult (is it though?), people that had completely different lives and stories, people that also had a connection, a shared experience, because I was writing about a recruiter for a cult that tells small stories to convince people to change their lives, because I wanted the book to feel like a manual of stories Alex may use to bring new people into the Core, I wanted the separate feeling short stories provided but the wholeness of a novel. Where it sits on that spectrum completely depends on the reader.
A reader needs space to imagine. They also need space to feel lost and disconnected. I want to give readers a space to wonder about the idea that anything can be cohesive.
If you have any questions you want answered, leave a comment below. As always, share with your friends, purchase a copy, and give me a review on Amazon.
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