Watch out for Polters!

My new novel, Polters, is set for release on March 1, 2023.

What is a Polter? It’s a kind of ghost, a lot like us, but more dead. They’re a kind of human being who was living but is no more, but since Polters don’t remember having been alive, they don’t claim to be dead. They don’t use the term. Dead is a value judgment.

Here’s the book’s description:

Clay, a young Portland photographer, devastated by the recent murder of his girlfriend, Lane, boards a midnight ferry across the river to Bardonia, a town not on any map, full of the city’s recently deceased, called Polters. The residents there  are in chaos since their way forward, the train station, is blocked by a reactionary gang. As he searches for Lane in the land of the dead, he meets Ella, a Polter, and is horrified at feeling attracted to a dead person, but together they liberate the station, restoring the Polters’ path to destiny. On the fog-shrouded platform, he must decide whether to go with Ella to wherever Polters go, or return to ordinary life and mourn for Lane.

Polters is about reality–the reality of death and  love, with plenty of action on both sides of the silent river that separates them.

It was fun to write, but hard to publish because it’s not obviously sci-fi. It does involve a high-tech “sci-fi” computational camera that acts as a portal between the worlds of the living and the dead, but the emphasis is on the relationship between the living and the dead, a topic for which there is no science.

I had a sinking feeling that this novel fell into the fantasy category, even though I wanted to paint a “realistic” picture of the relationship between the living and the dead–granting that nobody actually knows what that reality is. The thought of  being in the fantasy category, nestled among dragons, witches, angels, and who knows what-all, gave me the creeps.

Maybe I had written a literary novel.  The literary category has two domains. The larger is about family, kinship, marriage, babies, immigration, ethnicity, and various rites of passage. In this group, the big reveal is typically who the real father (mother, brother, sister, etc.) was. I find such novels uninteresting.

But there is another section in the literary genre that engages big ideas instead of tribal  sentimentality. Such novels include Moby Dick, The Great Gatsby, and novels by people like Ishiguro, Towles, Everett, and many others. Even stories centered on family life can engage big ideas. Virginia Woolf did it, as have others.

Is Polters an idea-based literary novel?  I think it is, but alas, “literary” is not a recognized marketing category either. It’s not a choice on Amazon or Bowker, and you won’t find a shelf at Barnes & Noble labeled “Literary.”

In the end, I went with “psychological fiction” and “metaphysical” as my sanctioned categories, scrupulously avoiding fantasy and horror and not even mentioning sci-fi.  There should be a category called “no-man’s land.” That’s where I write from.

Polters is available as a 6×9 paperback on Amazon, or as a Kindle book. It’s also available as an e-book at many other retailers. Just enter the UBL (Universal Book Locator) to see those retailers.

Kindle ebook:  ISBN 979-8-9877761-1-7   Search Amazon by title or author

KDP Paperback:   ISBN 979-8-9877761-0-0  Search Amazon by title or author

Universal Book Locator: UBL https://books2read.com/u/mBVzVk