Friday, July 19, 2024

Book Feature & #ExclusiveExcerpt ~ Nine Levels by Elana Gomel ~ Fantasy, Speculative Fiction, Greek Mythology ~ @MirrorWorldPub @ElanaGomel

Mirror World Publishing and Sapphyria's Book Promotions present the 1-week virtual book tour for Nine Levels by Elana Gomel.


About Nine Levels:

Waking up on the beach in Greece after a midnight party, Cleo, a British-Greek tourist, sees a stranger sitting next to her. The stranger has a giant spider on his forearm.

So begins an incredible odyssey through the nine levels of the mysterious mountain populated by an odd assortment of monsters, demons, and avatars of dead gods. Still grieving the unsolved disappearance of her twin sister Cora, Cleo is thrust into the world whose rules she does not understand and whose inhabitants confound everything she thought she knew about Greek mythology. Confronted by Woven Women, masked huntresses, sentient graffiti, and Mother of Monsters, Cleo has to make sense of it all. And meanwhile, a mysterious Call reverberates in her brain: You have to go up. You have to find your sister.

A story of self-discovery, courage, and breathtaking adventure, Nine Levels is a highly imaginative, innovative, and engrossing retelling of familiar legends with a twist you won’t see coming.

Exclusive Excerpt:

“Come on!” The woman set off at a brisk pace and Cleo, too shocked to assert her independence, followed. She cast a fearful glance toward the bench where she had woken up, but the man with a spider was gone. Had he really been there?

Cleo trudged on, keeping her head down and refusing to look to her right where the impossible monolith of the mountain rose above the promenade. If she did not acknowledge it, would it go away? It was a weird thought but no weirder than everything else that was happening to her. The dazzle of the sun seemed to be dissolving reality into a fluid nightmare. All she wanted right now was to take a hot shower, discard her salt-encrusted clothes, and hide her head under the blanket, hoping to fall asleep – or to wake up.

“Are you alone here?” the crow woman asked.

“With friends.”

“Where are they?”

That was a good question, which unleashed Cleo’s pent-up indignation at Iris and Mick for abandoning her on the beach. She opened her mouth to say she did not know, and they could go to hell for all she cared – mates don’t do things like this, leaving you alone and unconscious on the beach after a party, to be robbed or worse…

The words stuck in her mouth. She suddenly realized something she should have realized immediately when the crow woman had first addressed her.

Cleo understood the woman perfectly, but she could not tell what language she was speaking.

Cleo spoke fluent Greek. Her mother Daphne was a Greek who married an Englishman named Jerrod Brown and moved to Brighton with him. When Mr. Brown abandoned his wife and twin daughters to disappear into the limbo of deadbeat husbands and fathers, the girls were shipped to their maternal grandmother Eleni on Karystos. When they reluctantly came back to England several years later, Cleo and Cora spoke only Greek to each other. Other identical twins develop their own private languages; the Brown twins picked up the language of Homer for that purpose. Daphne, who always tried to be more British than the Queen, was not happy, but she had enough trouble surviving on the council estate to worry about the twins’ national identity.

Growing up bilingual had its advantages and disadvantages. Cora seemed to have accumulated more mental bruises from being suspended between two worlds; Cleo fit in better by learning to shapeshift linguistically, picking up accents like trophies, to the point that her friends in London did not know she spoke Greek and her Greek acquaintances did not realize she was British.

But even if Cleo had automatically answered the crow woman in Greek, how could she not know what language they were speaking? It made no sense.

“I am Cleo,” she said tentatively. “What’s your name?”

She heard the sounds leaving her mouth, but for the life of her, she could not say whether it was English or Greek. It was…language, that was all; a means of communication. She understood herself. She knew the crow woman understood her. But it was as if the richness of many different tongues had been compressed into something uniform and bland. Cleo, like all bilingual people, felt she had different personas in Greek and in English, and now these personas were blended into an average Cleo. As her language became invisible to her, she felt she was becoming invisible to herself.

“I’m Alexandra,” the crow woman responded, and Cleo tried to roll the sound of the name on her tongue, tasting each syllable. Was it the broad A of English or the more subdued Ἀ of Greek? She could not tell.


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Release Date: July 17, 2024

Purchase Links:

Mirror World Publishing:

Ebook

Paperback

Amazon US

Kindle ebook and Paperback

Meet the Author:


Born in Ukraine and currently residing in California, Elana Gomel is an academic, an award-winning writer, and a professional nomad. She is well-known for her work on speculative fiction and narrative theory, represented by her academic books, which Beyond the Golden Rule, Bloodscripts, and The Palgrave Handbook of Global Fantasy. Twelve years ago she published her first fantasy novel and has never looked back. She is the author of more than a hundred short stories, two collections, several novellas, and seven novels. She writes dark fantasy, dark SF, fairy tales, and hard-to classify dreamlike stories, some of them connected to her roots in the former USSR. Her stories won several awards, and “Mine Seven” was featured in the Best of Horror 13 edited by Ellen Datlow. Her latest fiction publications are the dark fairy tale Nightwood (Silver Award in the Bookfest 2023 competition) and Girl of Light, an alternative history of the USSR with monsters. Many of her stories and novels have mythological and folkloric overtones, inspired by her travels and her academic research. Having lived in several countries including Israel, Italy, the UK, and Hong Kong, she now resides in the magical – and sinister – redwoods of the Santa Cruz Mountains with her husband.

Amazon Author Profile: https://amzn.to/3z5FHeU


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