TITLE: Eye of the Storm
RELEASE DATE: 08/10/2016
AUTHOR: Frank Cavallo
KEYWORDS: fantasy, adventure, sword & sorcery, wizardry, knights, magic,
horror
CATEGORIES: Horror/Fantasy
PAGE COUNT: 402
ISBN: 978-1535327077
IMPRINT: Dark Serpent
ONE LINER: Catapulted into a lost world, Eric Slade and Anna
Fayne must hunt down an ancient treasure that holds their only chance to return
home
SYNOPSIS: On a research mission in one of the most remote
regions of the world, former Navy SEAL Eric Slade and Dr. Anna Fayne are caught
in a mysterious storm. Catapulted through a rift in space-time, they are
marooned on a lost world.
Struggling to
survive and desperate to find a way home, they must confront the dangers of
this savage land—a dark wizard and his army of undead—a warrior queen and her
horde of fierce Neanderthals that stands against him—and a legendary treasure
with the power to open the gateway between worlds, or to destroy them all: the
Eye of the Storm.
Guest Post:
What was your
writing process like for The Eye of the
Storm?
My experience
writing this book was a little different than for my past novels. One of the
things I always try to do when I’m in the middle of a project is to get as
close to the real location as possible. When you’re writing about a specific
place, there’s no substitute for seeing, hearing and feeling it yourself, for
going there and soaking up all the little details.
For one, I think it
lends the material a level of authenticity that is close to impossible to get
any other way (you can read everything ever written about Gettysburg, for
example, but you’ll learn more about how the place really is by spending one
day walking the field for yourself.)
Second, immersing
myself in a new place always gives me a kick-start. Seeing new sights, meeting
new people, tasting new foods, all of it makes me want to write. Sometimes I’ll sit down on a break somewhere, flip
open a notebook and just start scribbling down every random observation I
can—the way the grass smells after an early morning rain shower, how the desert
sun bakes the dirt so that it’s rock hard—all the things you’d never get from a
book, but strike you deeply when you’re really there.
This book is a
fantasy tale though, set in a completely imagined parallel world. So, I did the
next best thing—I found the spot that most closely resembled what I was writing
about. For Eye of the Storm, a lot of
the action takes places on rolling grassy steppes and a vast, bleak desert,
much of it dominated by hordes of mounted warriors. That made my choice
clear—Mongolia.
With a hired guide
and a group of other travelers, I spent several weeks touring the land of the
Khans. Like most tour groups in that country, where roads outside of major
cities are largely non-existent, we rambled around the countryside in a couple
of old Russian UAZ vehicles, spending our nights in yurt camps or pitching a
tent on the steppe.
The country is
huge, mostly empty and in many places totally inhospitable. I got a sense
almost from the get-go how this landscape could forge a people so hardy they
would conquer half the world. Despite that ferocious reputation however, and in
stark contrast to the barren land they inhabit, I found the Mongols of today to
be some of the most hospitable people
I’ve ever met.
One family of
nomads we encountered—totally at random—invited us to spend a few days with
them. They brought us into their home, a portable structure called a ger, where they showed us their Buddhist
shrine, their solar-powered flat screen TV and offered us their own home-made
fermented horse milk.
The father was a
man with a wind-burned face that looked chiseled from stone. He had
sun-narrowed eyes that formed the most intimidating stare I’ve ever seen, yet
he was almost disarmingly friendly. It turned out he was just as curious about
us as we were of him.
Even before I left
the place, this book was being written. So much of what I saw there is in the
final product. The vast, red rock desert of the Gobi Desert’s Flaming Cliffs.
The rolling steppes and the endless sea of grass where I camped under the
stars. Fearsome warriors and their powerful horses—the Mongols who welcomed me
and showed me their amazing country.
Writing this book
was an experience unlike any other I’ve had, and hopefully that gives The Eye of the Storm something that it
could not have had otherwise.
AUTHOR BIO: Frank Cavallo is the author of The Hand of
Osiris and The Lucifer Messiah. His short stories have appeared in a
variety of publications, including Every Day Fiction, Ray Gun Revival, and
Lost Souls. He has also written for the Black Library’s Warhammer property,
including several short stories in their monthly fiction magazine Hammer
& Bolter, as well as a novella featured in the collection Gotrek
& Felix: Lost Tales.
AUTHOR LINKS:
http://www.frankcavallo.com http://www.frankcavallo.com/news-updates
http://www.twitter.com@fjcavallo
Buy Links:
AMAZON US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01JU28GCW
AMAZON UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01JU28GCW
AMAZON CA: https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B01JU28GCW
CREATESPACE: https://www.createspace.com/6428165
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