Scott Hawkins’ Debut Novel The Library at Mount Char Arrives June 16th
Debi Moore
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The Library at Mount Char, the brilliantly crafted debut novel from Scott Hawkins arriving June 16th from Crown, is a great creepy read to get lost in this summer. It has everything from murders to reanimated corpses to terrible ancient beings with the power to destroy humanity… what more could Dread Central readers want?
We’ll be posting an exclusive excerpt and giveaway for The Library at Mount Char next week, but in the meantime here are the preliminary details on the new book.
Hawkins (pictured below) represents a new voice among the ranks of contemporary fantasy greats such as Neil Gaiman, Joe Hill, and Lev Grossman. The Library at Mount Char is equal parts gripping contemporary fantasy, riveting thriller, and vivid horror. Yet, Hawkins’ masterful new novel is also marked by a deadpan, darkly playful sense of humor with a quirky cast of characters including a Buddhist burglar-turned-plumber, a lion named Naga, a war hero who insists on being called Erwin, and the most terrifying killer ever to don a tutu.
Synopsis:
On the morning of the day she would later call “adoption day,” Carolyn was very much like any other eight-year-old girl. She woke up in her bedroom in her parents’ house in their neat little suburban subdivision of Garrison Oaks, had a bowl of Frosted Flakes, and helped her mother make a big batch of potato salad for that day’s Labor Day picnic. She did not know, as she mixed the ingredients into the bowl, that she and many of her neighbors would soon be orphaned, then forced into an apprenticeship that would teach them the secrets of the universe.
The man she would learn to call Father could do strange things. He could call light from darkness and raise the dead. He raised Carolyn and her dozen adopted siblings to study his ancient catalogs, catalogs that imparted some of the secrets of his equally ancient power. They learned to resurrect, to speak to animals, to know futures that would never be, and to speak the languages of the world, Carolyn studying English, French, and Japanese studied alongside the language of storms. When they disobeyed, the consequences were terrible.
Sometimes they wondered whether their cruel tutor might be God.
But now Father is missing, and if he truly is gone, the only thing that matters is who will inherit his library—and with it, the power over all of creation. As Carolyn prepares for the battle to come, what she doesn’t realize is that her victory will require a heartbreaking sacrifice.
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