What Are You Reading? Plus Meditations on Cliffhangers, and This Week’s Selection of Giveaways

“But Krymov was now in the grip of new impressions; he was walking on the earth of Stalingrad.”

Stalingrad

So ends Vasily Grossman’s magnificent Stalingrad, the “prequel,” as it were, to his even more magnificent Life and Fate. He originally intended them as a two-part work that would tell a complete story; due to the vagaries of publication, Stalingrad was published in the Soviet Union (under the title For a Just Cause) in the 1950s, while Life and Fate was published in the West in the 1980s. Stalingrad finally appeared in English translation for the first time this summer, in what was the Russian translation event of the year. So naturally I had to read it.

I could go on and on about how good it is, but I recommend reading it for yourself instead of taking my word for it. It’s a war novel, and a production novel, and a family drama, and a picture of Soviet life during the first part of WWII, when things were looking truly bleak for the USSR. Stalingrad ends, as you can see from the quote above, just as one of the main characters, finally sets foot in the city after retreating all the way from Kiev and receiving the “Not One Step Back” order to stop the Soviet retreat and hold the line at Stalingrad.

I’ve always loved this kind of ending, especially as, in this case, it concludes an early installment in a series. It’s very Romantic-with-a-Capital-R, as we see in the delightfully fragmented works of Pushkin, Lermontov, or “Odysseus’s Fate,” my favorite poem by Konstantin Batyushkov. I love the sudden opening of the narrative, the feeling that, just as you think the journey is over, a hidden vista has suddenly appeared on the horizon. They give so much space for the reader to create their own meaning, just when it seems that the author is about to collapse the storyline into one interpretation.

In other words, I’m an unashamed fan of what are commonly called cliffhangers. I adore encountering them in the novels that I read, and I love to incorporate them in my own books.

That being said, they have to be used with care. In the above example, it works so well in Stalingrad because 1) Krymov has been striving the entire book to get to Stalingrad, so his arrival is the resolution of that storyline as well as the beginning of a new storyline, about the actual Battle of Stalingrad, and 2) there’s a sequel.

Since I write stories that combine elements of mystery/thriller/suspense and romance, cliffhangers have to be approached with especial care. Both of those genres require a very specific kind of plot resolution. Mysteries have to end with the protagonist solving the main mystery, otherwise they’re not mystery stories, and romance novels have to end with the two main protagonists ending up together. No exceptions! Romance readers are very strict about this, as they should be. I mean, you can write a story about a failed romance, but it’s not a romance novel.

Of course, if you’re writing a series, the rules can be a bit looser, in that the resolution can happen at the end of the series rather than the end of each book. So in Robert Galbraith’s Cormoran Strike books, each book ends with a specific mystery being solved, but the ongoing romantic tension between the two characters only grows from book to book, without (yet) being resolved. In fact, the third book, Career of Evil, ends on a devilishly suspenseful moment.

In case you haven’t guessed, I’m a huge fan of the series. Have you read it? How do you think it compares with Harry Potter? I may actually prefer it to HP, although Harry will always hold a special place in my heart…

So in my own writing, I specifically sought to borrow techniques that I particularly enjoy from authors I particularly admire. Which means I resolve the main suspense/thriller/mystery conflict at the end of each of my Doctor Rowena Halley books, but then leave a little transitional moment at the very end that provides both resolution of the romantic subplot, and a cliffhanger-ish moment leading into the next book.

So in Campus Confidential,

(you see what I did there?)

Campus Confidential Front Cover Small

Speaking of Campus Confidential, KU subscribers should check out the Mysteries & Thrillers on Kindle Unlimited book event. Dozens of mysteries & thrillers, all free on KU, have been gathered together in one place for your perusing pleasure!

the main mystery and action scene are resolved, but I end with the hint that my protagonist Rowena *may* be starting a new romance.

In Permanent Position, the second book in the series, I up the cliffhanger stakes, ending with the following words (SPOILER ALERT!):

Permanent Position Front Cover

And if you haven’t yet picked up a free Advance Review Copy of Permanent Position, you can find it and dozens of other mysteries and thrillers in the Page Turning Mystery/Thriller Giveaway.

“But there, in amongst all the junk mail, was an email from Dima. Both the subject line and the body had the same, two-word message:

Forgive me.”

Like Krymov’s arrival in Stalingrad I quoted at the beginning of this post, this ending serves both as an end point and a beginning. A theme that runs through the entire novel is forgiveness and redemption. Dima’s request for forgiveness thus acts as the culmination of that thread of the story, while simultaneously opening up possibilities that until that moment had seemed closed. It’s literally a pivotal moment, causing the overall storyline of the series to pivot in a new direction at the “hinge” between two books.

Summer Session, the novella that comes right after Permanent Position, has a slightly less cliffhanger-y ending, but also has a kind of “hinge” moment in its final scene.

Summer Session Cover Small

If you haven’t yet gotten a free Advance Review Copy of Summer Session, you can get it and loads of other mystery shorts in the Summer Shorts! Giveaway.

Summer Session ends with the following conversation:

“Is that a promise?” I asked.

He grinned. “You bet.”

Again, it’s a resolution, but it’s a resolution that leaves a lot open. The juxtaposition of the words “promise” and “bet” suggest both certainty and uncertainty. The future, as Tom Petty would tell us, is actually wide open, even as the characters appear to be closing it down.

Wow! What a lot of writing! It’s fun to apply my carefully honed skills in close reading to my own works–until this moment I had never even thought about the “promise” and “bet” thing 🙂

But enough about that–what do you like to read? What are some books/series you’ve read recently that have really knocked your socks off?

And now for this week’s selection of giveaways:

Summer Thrills and Chills

The Summer Thrills & Chills Giveaway is still going strong!

Damsels who cause distress

Want to find a whole host of kickass heroines? Check out the Damsels Who Cause Distress Giveaway on StoryOrigin!

Back to School Special

School doesn’t have to be boring! Swing by the Back to School Special Giveaway to stock up on all your school-related reading.

“Fardwor, Russia!” by Oleg Kashin

Fardwor, Russia!

Oleg Kashin is one of those people you’d probably only find in Putin’s Russia. An ardent opposition journalist who was severely beaten for his statements and who has subsequently spent much of his career abroad, Kashin walks a line somewhere between freedom and non-freedom, between bravely standing up for his convictions and just being a crank. The existence of writers like him shows both how far freedom of the press has come in Russia over the past few decades, and how far yet it still has to go before becoming truly free.

“Fardwor, Russia!” which was completed shortly before Kashin’s infamous assault, also walks some kind of a line. It’s a bizarre tale of contemporary political satire, with a side of science fiction and magic realism. Fans of Russian literature will recognize it as being one in a long line of such works produced by Russian authors struggling to describe the surreal situations in which their society found itself. “Fardwor, Russia!” is more than a little reminiscent of Mikhail Bulgakov’s “The Fatal Eggs,” but if anything even zanier.

The plot is simple–but it isn’t. Karpov, a scientist, has created a serum that causes creatures to grow. He uses it on a couple of human midgets before branching out into agricultural animals, and then finally human children. The consequences for all are disastrous.

The writing style of the book is somewhere between exuberant and…over-exuberant, let’s say. The plot moves at a breathless pace, hurried along by Kashin’s use of incredibly convoluted sentences. Although Russian sentences tend in general to be rather more interesting than the bland, over-simplified structure that has become the stultifying rage in American prose over the last century, Kashin’s style is particularly unrestrained. English-language readers unused to the experience of reading in Russian may feel as if they’ve been whacked in the head as they try to follow along.

Speaking of stylistic things, the translation varies between brilliant and wobbly, and the editing of the book leaves a little to be desired. While I’m thrilled to see all these small presses putting out translations of contemporary Russian authors, I’ve noticed that the production values of these editions tends to be on the low side. “Fardwor, Russia!” isn’t terrible in that regard, but it could have used another round of close reading by a copy editor to pick up the occasional stray typo and make decisions about the consistent use of Russian vs. Ukrainian spelling for the Ukrainian names in the book.

Those nitpicking issues aside, I do recommend this book to anyone interested in reading some contemporary Russian fiction and trying to understand the current zeitgeist of a certain aspect of Russian society. Russian literature has expressed itself and its society through the use of the absurd at least since the time of Gogol; in “Fardwor, Russia!” Kashin is continuing that line.

Buy it on Barnes and Noble or Amazon.

Gorky Park Revisited

Hello everyone! I’m thrilled to announce that I’ve got a new story in the Doctor Rowena Halley series out now. In fact, it’s the prequel, the foundation story, the backstory…whatever you want to call it. It’s a novelette of about 20k words, takes place the winter before the beginning of the main series, and explains how Rowena and Dima broke up and why Rowena can’t go back to Moscow…or can she?

You can get a FREE copy of my new story “Foreign Exchange,” plus dozens of other free stories, in the Event Horizon Giveaway!

I don’t want to give away too many spoilers, but the story takes place over Christmas 2013 and New Year’s 2014. It’s set in Moscow, but the events of the Euromaidan protests in Kiev form a backdrop to the action.

A couple of the key scenes in the story take place in Gorky Park. I chose to do that first of all because Gorky Park is a major Moscow landmark and one I have happy memories of, and second of all because it’s one of the few Moscow landmarks that Americans know by name. It’s my little homage to Martin Cruz Smith’s excellent and ground-breaking Gorky Park, that foundational Russian-themed thriller. And although my own series is very different from Smith’s, I do enjoy dropping that kind of Easter egg 🙂

Of course, “Foreign Exchange” is choc-a-bloc full of references to Russian literature as well, and lots of other things Russian. I could go on and on about the real-life people and events behind the story, and I’m sure I will in future posts, but instead of getting sidetracked, I think I’ll drop an excerpt for you here instead:

Foreign Exchange

It started off just like any other trip to Russia.

After living a life of extreme parsimony all fall, I had saved up enough money to buy a cattle-class ticket from Indianapolis to Moscow, where I had been going every school break for the past six years.

Just like I had every single time previously, I promised myself as I sat at the gate at Indianapolis, and then again at the gates at O’Hare and JFK, and with considerable fervency somewhere around hour six of being jammed into the very back row for the ten-hour flight from JFK to Sheremetyevo, Moscow’s biggest international airport, that next time Dima would come to me.

The reason I was making this trip, just like all the trips before it, was not because I loved Moscow—although I did—but because I loved someone in it. Namely, my fiancé, Dmitry Vladimirovich Kuznetsov. Known as Dima to his friends and family, and, increasingly, a national traitor and an enemy of the people to his enemies. And by December 25 (tickets were cheaper on Christmas Day), 2013, Dima had made a lot of enemies.

He hadn’t originally meant to. In fact, originally he had meant to be a hero of the people, just like his father before him, who had died so gallantly and so pointlessly in Afghanistan shortly after Dima’s birth.

Being the son of a dead war hero you didn’t remember was a lot of pressure. Growing up during perestroika and then the incredible turmoil of the collapse of the USSR and the wild, wild Yeltsin years was a lot more pressure. Maybe that explained why Dima had decided to re-enlist after he finished his mandatory two-year military service, only this time in OMON, the special forces riot control units that had such a bad reputation. Or maybe as the only son of a single mother with long-term health problems, he just really needed the money.

In any case, they had sent him off to do bad things in bad places, mainly hunting down and interrogating suspected rebels in Chechnya. That had turned out to be less glorious and honorable than Dima had hoped. Back in Moscow, dragging his former friends by the legs into police vans had been even less glorious, and the money had never been very good anyway. So by the time I met him, in 2005, he had gotten out of OMON and started a new career, this time as a journalist hellbent on fighting crime and corruption. There was certainly plenty of scope for that. Unfortunately, in Russia crime and corruption had a tendency to fight back.

***

Like what you’ve read? Here’s that link to get a FREE copy of “Foreign Exchange” in the Event Horizon Giveaway

Karma Not-So-Chameleon: The Moral Arc Underpinning “Campus Confidential” (And New Giveaways!)

Hi All! It’s a lovely spring day and I’m feeling a tiny bit better (for those who don’t know, I have a serious long-term illness) than I have been, so it seems like a great time to play some cheery music. Namely, this insidious earworm:

You can thank me later for filling your head with this song all day

Fun fact: I moved to Russia in the early 90s, where I got to experience Western decadence such as MTV for the first time! Yes! Clearly I will have to share that little story at some point. “Karma Chameleon” was one of the songs that MTV Europe’s 80s hour played on heavy rotation. I’ve had a fondness for it ever since.

Anyway, enough with the musical interludes. Since I, like my heroine Rowena, am a professor with a doctorate in literature, it should come as no surprise that my books are full of structure, themes, motifs, wordplay, allusions, and everything else you might think of in the way of literary flourishes. So today I thought I’d show you, my special readers, a little of the chassis and undercarriage of “Campus Confidential.”

Only a little over a month till the release date!

For those of you who haven’t read it yet, “Campus Confidential” is about a newly-minted PhD and contingent faculty member who gets caught up in both the usual sorts of bad things faculty deal with–bullying, poverty, self-doubt, lack of job security–and some special bad stuff involving crime and violence. Although crime and violence are certainly plenty prevalent on college campuses. A large percentage of Rowena’s experiences are taken more or less directly from real life.

That being said, while a lot of the details of “Campus Confidential” are based on some pretty gritty realities, the overall structure of the story is that of a fairy tale. Rowena is the fairy tale heroine taken away from her home and thrown into a bad situation. Like many fairy tale heroines, her heroism is not in her strength of arms but in her strength of moral character. Repeatedly throughout the story she encounters people who are in some way her social inferiors, who show no immediate ability to help her on her quest, and who may be actively annoying–e.g., rude students, street harassers, difficult bosses, and so on. Every time, she wrestles with how to treat these people, and every time she decides to give in to her better nature and treat them with kindness and understanding.

Rowena thus moves through the narrative generating more and more good karma (here’s that video again, in case you missed it the first time around): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmcA9LIIXWw

In the final denouement, her good karma comes back to save her, just as it does a fairy tale heroine. “Campus Confidential” is a heroic narrative, albeit of a particular sort. It’s a modern-day fairy tale, in which the heroine is living in the “real world” and embedded in real-life current events, and yet also has a toehold in a magical, spiritual realm where dreams sometimes come true and karma is very, definitely, real.

And now, as promised, brand-new giveaways for April!

Come join the collective, comrades! Sixteen super-hot spy, suspense, and sexy romance books, all connected to the former USSR! Check it out here.

Laugh it up with the April Fools’ Giveaway!

And it’s the last week for the First in Series Giveaway! 115 free series starters!

Meet My Main Character, Rowena Halley

Hi All! Today I thought I’d introduce everyone to the main character of my new academic suspense series. But first, if you haven’t already picked up a free Advance Review Copy of Campus Confidential, the first book in the series, you can get get it and dozens of other free thriller and suspense books in the Mystery and Suspense Giveaway, which will be running until January 31.

I’ll be doing character sketches of all my recurring characters in the series, and today I’m starting with Rowena Halley, PhD, the main viewpoint character. So without further ado, here you go:

Rowena Arwen Halley

Born 1980. Grew up largely in Georgia, where she spent much of her childhood in a commune loosely modeled off The Farm in Tennessee. Her parents met while serving together in the Peace Corps and are unrepentant hippies, although they did go mainstream enough to get advanced degrees; Rowena’s mother is a medical doctor and her father is a social worker. Both of them work in a non-profit addiction clinic in Atlanta at the opening of the series, although they later go off to do a stint with Doctors Without Borders.

Rowena is “Black Irish,” meaning she has dark hair and light eyes. In Campus Confidential she mentions a couple of times that people thinks she looks vaguely like Elizabeth Taylor, only taller and with a yoga body. In my mind she looks a bit like the actress Tara Breathnach:

Rowena’s dark hair and light eyes, combined with her exotic-to-Russian-ears name of Halley (“Khalli”), frequently cause her Russian-speaking acquaintances to assume that she is Pashtun. This causes a number of amusing interchanges.

Rowena’s first name is from Ivanhoe and her middle name is from The Lord of the Rings, in keeping with her parents’ 1970s hippie ethos. Her last name is my nod to Dick Francis’s recurring character Sid Halley, which is also the inspiration for my own pen name.

Rowena graduated from the University of Georgia in 2002 with a BA in Russian. She then spent 2002-2008 working for a human rights NGO in Moscow, where she acted as an election observer and gathered the stories of refugees and victims of political repression, particularly those affected by the Second Chechen War. During this time she met and became engaged to opposition journalist Dmitry Vladimirovich Kuznetsov, AKA Dima.

In 2008 Rowena, with the encouragement of Dima’s mother Galina Ivanovna, enrolled in a PhD program in Russian literature at Indiana University. The plan was for her to have steady long-term employment that would ideally allow Dima and Galina Ivanovna to join her in the US. Instead, the engagement was called off by Dima in January 2014.

Rowena defended her dissertation and graduated in Spring 2014. The first book in the series, Campus Confidential, begins in Fall 2014.

Rowena’s dissertation was on the Silver Age (early 20th century) poet Marina Tsvetaeva.

Marina Tsvetaeav

Since I seriously considered writing my own dissertation on Tsvetaeva, this gave me a nice opportunity to engage in a little more Tsvetaeva research. It also provides a connection between Rowena and Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya

Anna Politkovskaya

(assassinated October 2006), who wrote her thesis on Tsvetaeva; opposition journalists are a major theme in the series and Politkovskaya gets name-dropped from time to time.

Tsvetaeva’s “Magdalene” cycle plays a significant role in the series (translations to come, I hope). Rowena’s association with it is one of the things that mark her as a Sacred Prostitute. The theme of prostitution comes up repeatedly in the books, with Rowena contemplating it as a career and comparing what she does now to prostitution. Rowena is associated both with Mary Magdalene and with other Sacred Prostitutes in Russian literature, notably Dostoevsky’s Sonya Marmemaledova from Crime and Punishment and Liza from Notes from Underground. Dostoevsky’s The Idiot is also a recurring theme, so there may be a hint of the wronged Nastasya Filippovna from that book as well.

Fun fact: Rowena’s repeated thoughts of taking up stripping and prostitution are based on my own real-life experiences! Several of my childhood friends became strippers, and, like Rowena, I have a long-running semi-joke with some of my colleagues about taking up stripping as being more lucrative and dignified than academia.

So now you’ve met Rowena! And once again, that link to the giveaway is here.