A lot changed for me when I wrote the novel The Man from Taured. Not only has it slowly, over time, become one of my bestselling novels across all platforms, but it changed a lot of my own thinking and changed the course of my writing, too.
Before TMfT I had written all kinds of weird stuff and thrillers, of course. I had toyed with the idea of alternate realities and perhaps dimensions, but as I toyed with those ideas, I began to research them, too. Of course, this ultimately led to my listening to old Art Bell shows on YouTube.
Art Bell, for those of you who do not know, was a guy who did an overnight radio show for years called Coast to Coast AM. This was when he was in his true prime. He eventually transferred control of the show to other people, became a guest host on the show he created, left the show, started other shows, but nothing ever quite matched Coast to Coast.
Art ruled the nighttime airwaves from his home in Parumph, NV, where he talked about things like ghosts, bigfoot, UFOs and other dimensions. He was the Kind of Conspiracy Theories and also talked about alternate dimensions, shadow people and the black eyed children. Before long, I fell town the rabbit hole into researching black eyed children and shadow men and then came across the urban legend of the man from Taured.
I figured the legend of the man who appeared at an airport claiming to be from a place called Taured, which did not exist, was a good place to start. Before long, I had created this entire organization called IDEA and was delving into the shadow men and black eyed children. This led me to explore the idea of alternate realities, all of them close by but vibrating at different frequencies from our own and the story took off.
I have since become enamored with the idea of alternate dimensions and realities. I have to wonder if they really exist and if much of the supernatural and high strangeness people experience is due to places on this plant where the walls between realities are a bit thin. Maybe, sometimes, things leak over from other worlds and then vanish again. UFOs, ghosts, demons, angels, bigfoot, even the Loch Ness Monster might be those who slip into our world and then slip right back out again.
I have delved into it again a few times. Even my psychological thriller Storyland mentions the possibility. This obsession has, of course, led to me latest novel The Revisionists.
Although Revisionists deals with the Mandela Effect, for me, the idea of that phenomenon has to do with alternate realities. With people adjusting and changing our current reality to try and fix things in the past. I simply had the thought that, what if a very powerful, very rich, very smart, but very unstable, man created a way to find the reality they wanted and force that into our current reality.
Altering time or toying with alternate dimensions, I think, is always dangerous. The walls, I think, between one reality and the next are very thin. In some places, I think as thin as tissue paper and sometimes the breeches between those realities open wide and something steps through. If those breeches were to become big enough, I think the entire house of cards of reality itself could collapse.
I dealt with it on a massive scale in The Man from Taured. I have pared the story down to a more personal tale in The Revisionists.
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You can pre-order The Revisionists at Amazon today. The book will be released March 19, 2019.
Kindle fans can get their copy for a special pre-order price of just 99 cents!