Alexander Verbeek-van den Toren is joining us today to talk about his novel, Corruption. Here’s the publisher’s description:
Trapped on an island, surrounded by lava…with a secret.
When their ability to connect to the magical Flow disappears, Revan and the other students at his college’s island are stranded, surrounded by fiery seas separating habitable regions. Revan can’t retreat to his home island, only in contact with people who don’t know his true identity.
While most people only have one of the five crystals in their torso lit up, determining their role in society, Revan is among the few with more than one lit-up crystal. If anyone find out, he’ll be considered Othercrystalled, and cast from society.
Torn between his feelings for his male best friend and a female classmate, with his secret close to being revealed, Revan discovers evidence the magic might not have been cut off naturally. Someone might be using the chaos to hunt Othercrystalled. Someone full of Corruption. Check out Alexander Verbeek-van den Toren’s debut book!
What’s Alexander’s favorite bit?
My debut novel Corruption is a queer fantasy that takes place on a world that is very different from our own; not only does it take place on a world where everybody’s born with five crystals in their body, the planet is also submerged in lava with the exception of a few islands where people live in skyscrapers, sex and romance on this world is viewed a bit differently as well, and religion is based around a mythical entity called the Flow. With that many weird things going on all at once in a novel, it can be very tricky to juggle the explanations just right. After all, I don’t want to lose the reader by instantly info-dumping all that stuff on them, but I will also lose the reader by explaining things too late or too little, and that was a problem I ran into with test readers.
What I love about editing is that in the end, no matter what everyone says, what I do with the feedback my test readers and editor tell me is up to me. In a fairly late draft of the story I still ran into some worldbuilding questions that hadn’t been answered properly, and in addition to that, two side characters felt like they came out of nowhere and needed a bit more fleshing out. None of those comments, however, were ‘rewrite chapter two in its entirety because it’s looking a bit weak!’. And yet, I looked at chapter two, wasn’t content with the way it worked out as the explanations felt a bit info-dumpy, and decided, I’m going to rewrite the whole thing in its entirety. For context; the magic that this whole planet revolves around has stopped in chapter one, and chapter two is the first chapter after.
The original version of chapter two felt like a fairly trite explanation from a teacher to their class, spiced up a little bit by some dialogue here and there between my protagonist and his best friend, but it still felt incomplete. When I threw out everything, I decided to instead have chapter two revolve around the protagonist and his best friend conversing with aforementioned two side characters who needed more fleshing out. Those four characters needed something to do, so on the fly I invented a game called Island Hopping. Because sometimes, when the worldbuilding isn’t landing correctly, the solution is actually more worldbuilding.
And voila, when I sent in the updated scene, suddenly the worldbuilding ended up landing and in the process, I’d fixed the relationships as well. Lots of things that felt wrong suddenly ended up feeling right, and all of that because I rewrote all of chapter two. It’s a fairly calm scene because those four characters playing a card game called Island Hopping is indeed all it is, nothing else, and yet through that game a lot of emotions are felt, and emotions are to me the quickest way to get a lot of good worldbuilding across without info-dumping. All those emotions are made even easier when a teacher drops by and asks how everyone is in these trying times.
Everything in the novel, from the complicated worldbuilding to the relationships between the different characters, serves to highlight the underlying theme of identity and a feeling of not belonging with the ‘normal’ people, feelings many queer people have indubitably felt, and I think this is a very queer novel. And yet the themes didn’t quite resonate until I updated that chapter two and everything clicked, which is why that ended up being my favorite bit.
Here’s hoping it will make other people, queer or not, feel the belonging that we’ve all lacked at some point in our lives!
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BIO:
By day, Alexander Verbeek-van den Toren is a child psychologist, but by night, when it’s dark outside and all the lights are turned off and everyone’s asleep… he’s asleep as well. In between those times, he writes and reads fanatically. He is a big fan of stories that show different cultures, whether they are real or imaginary. Queer stories also get a big leg up with him. Alexander writes and reads in English and Dutch. In the English language, his debut novel ‘Corruption’ will be coming out on January 13th, 2026. In the Dutch language, he shows up periodically in short story collections and short story magazines. Alexander lives with his husband and their dog in Spijkenisse, near Rotterdam, in the Netherlands.