A Vampire Novel with Actual Bite!

As the modern world establishes itself and pushes the supernatural into the shadows, the supernatural fights back.

The Darkening Dream is a chilling new dark fantasy novel by Andy Gavin, creator of Crash Bandicoot and Jak & Daxter. The book has received rave reviews and is on sale for only 99 cents on Amazon Kindle from June 25th-29th! Download your copy here.

In addition, Andy is doing a big giveaway, including a $100 gift certificate to Amazon, signed copies of his books, video games, posters, and more!

The Darkening Dream Rafflecopter Giveaway
Tweet, like, follow, share, blog and grab a copy of his book to enter.

Get your 99 cent copy of The Darkening Dream today on Amazon only.

Long-time readers of dark historical fantasy (Tim Powers, Guy Gavriel Kay, Katherine Kurtz) will appreciate the weaving together of mythology, occult, and religion, while younger readers and fans of HBO dramas (True Blood, Carnivàle) or urban fantasy (Laurell K. Hamilton, Kim Harrison, Jim Butcher) will be drawn to the twisted imagination, graphic action, and romantic tension.

About The Darkening Dream

Even as the modern world pushes the supernatural aside in favor of science and steel, the old ways remain. God, demon, monster, and sorcerer alike plot to regain what was theirs.

1913, Salem, Massachusetts – Sarah Engelmann’s life is full of friends, books, and avoiding the pressure to choose a husband, until an ominous vision and the haunting call of an otherworldly trumpet shake her. When she stumbles across a gruesome corpse, she fears that her vision was more of a premonition. And when she sees the murdered boy moving through the crowd at an amusement park, Sarah is thrust into a dark battle she does not understand.

With the help of Alex, an attractive Greek immigrant who knows a startling amount about the undead, Sarah sets out to uncover the truth. Their quest takes them to the factory mills of Salem, on a midnight boat ride to spy on an eerie coastal lair, and back, unexpectedly, to their own homes. What can Alex’s elderly, vampire-hunting grandfather and Sarah’s own rabbi father tell them? And what do Sarah’s continuing visions reveal?

No less than Gabriel’s Trumpet, the tool that will announce the End of Days, is at stake, and the forces that have banded to recover it include a 900 year-old vampire, a trio of disgruntled Egyptian gods, and a demon-loving Puritan minister. At the center of this swirling cast is Sarah, who must fight a millennia-old battle against unspeakable forces, knowing the ultimate prize might be her very soul.

The Reviews Are In

“A vampire novel with actual bite.” ~The Kirkus Reviews

“A gorgeously creepy, strangely humorous, and sincerely terrifying tale.” ~Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

“Mr. Gavin has brought something refreshingly new to a genre now suffused with poorly-concealed bodice-rippers which have more in common with Fabio than Bram Stoker: depth. His big baddies are scary, not romantic interests, and the added religious lore is complex and engaging. Don’t expect another Twilight — the story can get downright creepy, so be prepared for a return to the old horror sensibilities of supernatural fiction.” ~Amazon Review

“With Mr. Gavin’s video-game pedigree, I was expecting something aimed squarely at the 18-25 year old fanboy contingent; what I got in The Darkening Dream was something wholly unexpected: A period novel with a female protagonist, a crash-course on Judaism in the colonial years, and multi-layered series of plot arcs featuring a crazy cast of natural and supernatural characters populating turn of the century America.” ~Amazon Review

“…A perfect blend of mystery, magic and myth. A grown-up Grimm’s fairy tale… emphasis on grim.” ~Amazon Review

Read the first two sample chapters here.

Get your 99 cent copy of The Darkening Dream today on Amazon only.

About the Author

Andy Gavin is an unstoppable storyteller who studied for his Ph.D. at M.I.T. and founded video game developer Naughty Dog, Inc. at the age of fifteen, serving as co-president for two decades. There he created, produced, and directed over a dozen video games, including the award winning and best selling Crash Bandicoot and Jak & Daxter franchises, selling over 40 million units worldwide. He sleeps little, reads novels and histories, watches media obsessively, travels, and of course, writes. Find out more here.

© 2012 – 2013, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

Hi Andy. We’re here to specifically talk about your novel The Darkening Dream, but before we get into that I’d like to discuss Andy Gavin the author. You’re probably best known for being a co-founder of video game studio Naughty Dog. Can you tell us a bit about the journey that took you from there to becoming an author? When and how did your interest in writing begin?

From at least high school on I always intended to write a bunch of novels. Work just got in the way.

And the thing about making games is that you can no longer do it mostly by yourself. These days, most games are big teams of over a hundred people, with budgets over 50 million dollars. It’s no longer about your creative expression (most of the time), but about getting it done well, on time, and on budget. And the role of team lead is largely about fire fighting and resource (achem… people) wrangling.

So, I really wanted to focus directly on the creative aspects. Dozens of story ideas have been bouncing around in my head for years, and I felt it was time to let a couple of them out.

Have there been any times where you began to doubt your future as an author?

Of course. Fundamentally I believe in the strength of my writing and I get enough positive feedback to support that, but novels have a visibility problem. There are hundreds of thousands published every year and only a few rise to popularity. I’m pretty confident that a lot of people who read my books will love them, I just worry that not enough will find them.

Have you considered going back into game development?

I occasionally evaluate what that might mean. I love video games. They are also very creative, and it’s a bigger industry dollar-wise. But games today are also large projects that take a lot of money and people to get started.

You’ve had a lot of interests over the years and you seem to really dive into whatever creative field it is you’re currently working in. Knowing that, I’m curious if you have any opinions on the self-publishing scene?

I never do anything halfway. So in 2010 I read about 20 books on publishing and query writing and spent hundreds of hours researching and querying agents. Since I’ve self published one book and also have a real literary agent (my second book is on submission to New York) I know a bit about both.

The traditional route is all about waiting and bashing your head against a wall. You query and query, investing time and emotional currency, only to get back very little feedback. I eventually landed a great agent, although it took two books to do it. Then you submit and wait and also get very little feedback. With self publishing you have control of your destiny. I think with The Darkening Dream I made an A quality product. It’s heavily edited and proofed, professional typeset, and has a brilliant cover by acclaimed fantasy artist Cliff Nielsen. I have a great Kindle edition, a beautiful trade paperback, and a gorgeous hard cover edition (rare for an Indie book). But the marketing and sales arena is new and constantly shifting. There is no guaranteed way to get it out there and advertising is not very effective for novels. So you have to be creative and lucky.

Let’s talk about your first novel, The Darkening Dream, which released earlier this year. It’s a dark fantasy novel set in early twentieth century Salem. What made you settle on both the genre and the time period?

When I started writing the book I wasn’t thinking YA/adult, I was just thinking about my story. I find this age based slotting to be a recent and artificial construct of the big chain bookstores and marketing departments. Regardless, I like to read books with young protagonists, and you write what you like to read. In some ways, the meta idea of The Darkening Dream is a twisted gritty historic reinvention of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (which is my favorite television show of all time). I wanted to emulate the angst and wonder factor of dealing with newly discovered weirdness as a young person, but also ground the entire story in researched and “real” magic and occult, and “sell” it via a very hardboiled and matter of fact style.

As a history buff, I’m always thinking, “that could have been so much better if they didn’t make up the historical backstory” so I started with the villains. What kind of ancient evil creatures might still be around? What do they want? And what legitimate human reason would they have to destroy the world (which is so Buffy)? I don’t exactly answer the question in TDD, because the motives of 5,000 year old baddies should be mysterious. But trust me, they have a plan, and the sheer audacity of it will literally shake the foundations of the heavens.

The focal point of the novel is Sarah, a young girl coming of age and fearing the pressures of what that brings. Were there any challenges in writing a young, female lead from that time period?

I chose 1913 for a number of reasons. I wanted a time before mobile phones and the internet and a time when people’s knowledge of the world left a little more room for mystery. Additionally, as I always intended this as a series with long lived (achem… immortal) characters, I wanted some runway to cross through history. I also loved the idea of a “vampire in the trenches” so I stuck it right before World War I.

Fundamentally, I think I settled on a female protagonist because of contrast. A bookish female is the less expected character in the role of budding sorcerer and central pivot. I enjoyed trying to get inside the female head. They’re more exotic and foreign. I like exotic and foreign.

There are a lot of different supernatural elements to The Darkening Dream. Did you have any particular literary or religious influences that helped shape the story you created?

The book has a bunch of themes, but one of the overriding ones is the relativity of belief. Each religion, and even esoteric belief structure, has its own lens through which to view the world. I wanted to envision a system that made real the myriad magical and supernatural ideas people have historically held. But how to properly envision a world in which vampires, the Archangel Gabriel, witchcraft, and Egyptian gods all exist? Many writers might just toss them together arbitrarily, but I wanted to find a framework consistent with traditional mysticism. Having read hundreds of religious and magical texts I have identified numerous consistencies in the thought patterns of the esoteric mind. I have a more extensive write up on my magical researches here.

What was the experience like finally getting that first book out the door? Relief? Fear? Triumph?

After nine or more drafts, total exhaustion. Like a game release, it was very anticlimactic.

Judging by Amazon and other sources, the reviews seem overwhelmingly positive. Do you feel like that’s an affirmation that you’re doing just fine? Is it inspiring you to try even harder? Basically, what’s your reaction to the feedback you’ve received?

Reviews have been great. About 50 professional and blog reviews have been posted and eighty-seven on Amazon. The overwhelming majority are positive, even some going as far as to say it’s one of their favourite books ever. A few people love the book but don’t love the ending. But even Publishers Weekly, notoriously hardass, gave it a starred review and said, “Gorgeously creepy, strangely humorous, and sincerely terrifying tale.”

It’s gratifying that a lot of people seem to get what I was trying to do with the book and enjoy it.

What audience do you feel like your novel is targeted at? Who do you feel would get the most enjoyment out of it?

The book has a couple different audiences. At one level it’s a fast paced horror story packed with action, pretty solid characters, and even a bit of dark humor. I tried to marry a fairly hardboiled realistic tone with some pretty wild and dark stuff. The overall effect is pretty creepy and should appeal to those that like HBO fantasy dramas (True Blood, Carnivàle). There’s also a lot of interesting history and religious and occult detail in there which appeals to an older more historically oriented audience. But I tried not to ever let it bog the story, which (at Renni’s insistence) just moves and moves. Finally, the book has young characters and some romance for the younger fan of urban fantasy (Laurell K. Hamilton, Kim Harrison, Jim Butcher).

You’ve already been hard at work on your next novel, Untimed. In what ways has the writing process for that novel benefitted from your experiences writing The Darkening Dream?

I learned a tremendous amount while writing (and more importantly revising) The Darkening Dream. I used these lessons to make Untimed a stronger and more sellable novel. In early drafts TDD was too long and too unfocused, so for Untimed I chose a single first-person point of view. This helped focus the book. I also worked to make this voice unique and individual from the start. It’s unclear how much this matters to readers, but agents and editors love “voicey” prose. And perhaps most importantly, I went with a more high concept story that begins with a big hook and a dramatic inciting event in the first chapter.

Do you have any advice for up-and-coming authors out there?

Read, read, write, write, edit, edit, edit. And hire good professional help too. Friends and family can give you a sense of how the book reads, but they can’t usually tell you how to fix anything serious. I’ve read a lot of half-decent Indie books on my Kindle that are at their core good, but just need some serious tightening and polish. Hell, I’ve read plenty of big-six bestsellers you can say this about.

Thanks for taking the time to talk to us today.

If you’re curious about The Darkening Dream, you can read the first couple of chapters for free via the official website.
 For updates on Andy Gavin and his future projects, be sure to Follow him on Twitter and Subscribe on Facebook.

© 2012 – 2013, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.