Toward Ecosophy

 

Asenath Merrill, sixteen years old, spends her summers studying witchcraft in the village of Chorazin and her nights traveling the uncanny kingdoms of the Dreamlands. It's all perfectly ordinary if you happen to belong to one of the secretive cults that worship the Great Old Ones, your mother comes from Innsmouth and has tentacles for legs, and your grandmother is the Black Goat of the Woods herself.  When Asenath encounters a mysterious girl in the stone circle atop Elk Hill, however, her prosaic existence begins to stretch and blur into patterns she must struggle to master.

 

A century before, a family tragedy in the little Massachusetts town of Dunwich spun out of control and nearly plunged the world into chaos. Four centuries before that, armed men came to the Norse settlements on Greenland and slaughtered every person they could find, leaving a legacy that still troubles the family of Asenath's closest friend.  A secret from the ancient world connects those events with the girl named Cassie, and Asenath will need all her courage and her fledgling powers as a witch in training to unravel the mystery -- and open the way to her own unguessed destiny...

*********
When I started writing The Weird of Hali: Innsmouth six years ago, I had no idea that it was going to be the first eldritch, rugose installment of an eleven-novel series. Still, that's what happened, and to my taste, at least, this final volume -- set two years before the events in The Weird of Hali: Arkham, the final book in the original sequence -- does a good job of rounding it all off, tying up some loose ends while still leaving plenty of room for my readers' tentacular imaginations to slither freely. It's been a grand adventure and I'm grateful to everyone who's enjoyed the stories. In the meantime, yes, I have some other fiction projects under way...

By the way, if you haven't yet started on this sequence of eldritch adventures in a world where H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos has been turned on its head, where the Great Old Ones are the old gods of nature and their enemies are a cult of crazed rationalists who want to turn all that rhetoric about Man's Conquest of Nature into a bloodsoaked reality, the publisher's putting together some promotional deals on the earlier volumes; I'll be making an announcement about that sometime in the next few days.