L.D. Colter is joining us today to talk about her novel, While the Gods Sleep. Here’s the publisher’s description:
The first time Ty died he was five, the second time he was seven. He’s always believed his third death will be the final one, and now he may find out.
More than twenty years after his near-death experiences and the visions of terrifying gods that came with them, Ty leads a quiet life working as a locksmith.
When a client persuades him to play in an ancient game of throwing bones his peaceful existence is shattered and Ty quickly finds himself deeply in debt, his life hanging in the balance once more.
Forced to descend to the eerie mid-world of Erebus to repay his debt, his fate is soon entwined with sleeping gods, the factions that seek to control them, and an enemy powerful enough to destroy them all.
What’s L.D. Colter’s favorite bit?
My favorite bit of While the Gods Sleep, like three-headed Cerberus, is tripartite.
First, the novel is an homage to a couple of favorite authors I was reading voraciously when I first drafted it some years ago. More specifically, it’s a tribute to particular books of theirs that influenced me strongly: China Miéville’s Kraken and Tim Powers’ Last Call. In While the Gods Sleep, I tested my own use of new-weird fiction as well as going for broke with plot twists by using a mortal pitted against a slew of powerful enemies, playing with capricious gods, and barreling toward that big Powers-esque ending. I hope readers find it an engaging thriller that starts strongly and picks up speed right into the final pages.
The second favorite bit was getting to use Greek mythology for book one in my trilogy of myth-based novels. I’ve loved exploring mythology from around the world for almost as long as I’ve been able to read, but I’ve always held a special love of Greek mythology. It was great fun to write a dark fantasy of my own, set it in an alternate 1958 Greece, and send my character into an underworld filled with terrifying deities and monsters.
My third favorite bit is that Ty’s two childhood deaths (near-deaths, technically) were very nearly my own. “Favorite bit” may be a misnomer here, as I don’t love that I went through similar experiences myself, but it was an interesting opportunity to use a fictional character to share the details of the following two events.
When I was about four, I nearly hanged myself playing a game that older and—key point here—taller preschool children had been playing in a bathroom. A fabric shower curtain curiously hung over a concrete platform perfect for jumping from, and they’d been doing just that, perhaps in imitation of some Old West movie. Being the youngest meant I went last. They’d all left by then, and when I jumped with the curtain wrapped around my neck, as they had, my feet didn’t touch the floor. Fortunately, the curtain unwound on its own after a brief struggle, leaving me with only a burn across my throat that lasted for days instead of a more tragic outcome. Typical of things “back in the day,” no one looked for me, and when I came out hoarse and crying, the preschool teacher sent me for a nap. About a year later (the same age as Ty’s drowning), I decided I could swim across the deep end of the city swimming pool without ever having had a swimming lesson. It went about as well as you’d expect. A fully dressed man ended up jumping in after I’d submerged because, again “back in the day,” the lifeguard had gone to lunch. In my novel, I at least got the satisfaction of manipulating my character into making the same poor choices.
Below is an excerpt from early in the book where Ty, my Greek character with an Americanized nickname, recalls the first of his two (near) deaths.
Ty didn’t care for deep water. His first death, by drowning, had been the summer he’d turned five, shortly after he’d been allowed to join the older boys playing at the quarry pond. On a day like any other, bored with the endless splashing and diving for stones games and chicken fights, he’d decided to swim across the pond, despite the fact he’d never learned. He tiptoed along the underwater boulders that divided the shallow water from the deep. With the invincible faith of a child, he stepped off the rocks and dog paddled just far enough to cramp up over a section of water deep and black as a night sky. His legs sank like columns of stone.
Drowning hadn’t been the frantic, screaming thing people always seemed to imagine. It was a quiet death. He’d been unable to wave his arms because instinct kept them horizontal, pushing down on the water to lift himself up. He hadn’t yelled as, unable to kick, his head was never above the surface long enough to both breathe in and yell out. Breathing trumped yelling.
He bobbed in silence a few feet from where his friends were playing for maybe a minute or two, frightened, but not yet terrified, his mouth intermittently at, and then below, the waterline. When he sank beneath the surface for the final time his drowning was still quiet, but that’s when it got ugly.
He saw the old gods while he was down there—after the panic, after the struggle and the inevitable burning lungful of water. They were in some dark enclosure that was everywhere or nowhere. He could still remember their faces, all lined up on biers as if they, too, were dead: Morpheus, Hestia, Thanatos, Hypnos, Eros, Hemera and more, stretching back into the shadows.
The room vibrated with quiescent power. He was a child in the company of gods, and dead or not, real or not, they had terrified him.
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BIO:
L. D. Colter has farmed with draft horses and worked as a paramedic, Outward Bound instructor, athletic trainer, roller-skating waitress, and concrete dispatcher, among other curious choices. She’s an author of contemporary, epic, and dark fantasy novels, a WSFA Small Press Award finalist, and a two-time winner of the Colorado Book Award for science fiction and fantasy. You can find a list of her published works and more at https://www.ldcolter.com/