Love&Darkness: Vol. I - Available Now!

[ShadowBrain]

As a Kindle eBook - only $2.99!

For physical copies (Paypal button won't appear for some reason, but it's right below the cover image)


As you may have heard occasional remarks about around these parts, I did write a second book! Love&Darkness: Vol. I, that is: a collection of stories and poems I wrote from 2010 to 2012, wrapped into a thematically-connected compilation (part two indefinitely pending). The "set list" is as follows:

PART I – ACCEPTANCE
1 – All of My Ex-Girlfriends Are Monsters (Reggie DeFatales Must Die: A Cautionary Anecdote in Five Poems and a Limerick)
“So…then what you’re saying is, all your ex-girlfriends have, somehow, banded together, and are now ‘after you’?”
 “Yes,” Reggie winced.
“So I’m presuming you broke up with all of them.”
“Correct.”
“And—and since I’ve never met any of them, I’m just going to, uh, take your word for it…they are actual, inhuman creatures?”
“Pretty much.”
“What, with, like, fangs and claws and stuff?”
“Some of them, yeah.”
2 – It’s No Use
3 – A Man’s Got to Have His Priorities
4 – But Crazier Things Have Happened
5 – [Citation Not Needed]
6 – Fear Itself
7 – The Aftermath Villanelle
8 – Were
“How many have lived to tell of this beast’s violence? Likewise, how many moons have waxed and waned with no one caught suffering from curious scars or delirium?”
“Just what do you suggest?” asked the husband with irritation. “That it is a different breed of abomination altogether?”
“The absolute contrary,” the leader explained solemnly. “It is my conviction that he has embraced his nature, and learned to control it.”

INTERMISSION I
i – The Three Little Porcites and the Big Bad Lupoid
ii –  Totally Epic
I threw my controller to the couch and stood up. “I’ve got an idea!”
“What, what is it?”
“If we get rid of enough vampires and zombies, maybe they’ll stop making so many stories about them!”
Eddie raised an eyebrow. “You think?”
“It’s worth a shot, isn’t it?”
iii –  Distribution Methods
iv – Amusement

PART 2 – ADAPTATION
1 – Hi!
I rolled onto my back, lamenting as I did that my brand new mattress was less comfortable than my friend’s old one. “She said she wants us to be closer, but it’s not going anywhere.”
“How many dates have you been on?”
“Seven.”
“And…what base are you on?”
“Still making a run for first.”
He winced. “I see.”
“I wish that was the only thing bothering me,” I sighed.
“What do you mean?”
I sat up against the wall. “There’s something…strange about her. I don’t know what it is, but I can’t ignore it.”
2 – Fyrewrit
3 – “One Thousand Ways;” or, “Reinvented.”
The cycle of rejection was abhorrent:
Within and out the home, her nature [darn]ed.
And so one dusk, the rain a raging torrent,
She packed her choicest instruments and ran.
With lantern-light her sole and guiding ray,
She staggered past the furthest dead-end street,
Then on the moors, she found a place to stay:
A crippled mansion, straddled in the peat.
4 – The Agents of Fear
Don’t ask me how I know what to call them. Perhaps it’s something I’m meant to, by the very virtue of their presence. It doesn’t matter, because I’m still not afraid. And that’s why I’m writing this.

Because it’s killing me.
5 – Unthinkable
6 – In Finiti
“On this day,” the Magistrate reiterated, pointing at an overlaid date, “a massive meteor shower, the Maslow Cluster, impacted Earth with the force of ten thousand nuclear explosions. Seventy-five percent of the planet’s population died immediately, or over the course of several months… What life survived was violently mutated by exposure to alien chemicals spread throughout the atmosphere and water.” Tima was again quietly awed by the man, showing such calm at the sight.
7 – Ctrl+C
They gave me something, before melting into space as swiftly as they’d appeared. It looks like an SD card, but it’s something much more—a tingling flooded my arm as I pushed it into the port, and when I tried to read the data capacity, there was only a string of strange pictographs. I could recognize one, though: the symbol for “infinity.”

They gave it with a single thought: copy.
8 – Love&Darkness (A Song with No Music)

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So please, at least give it a look, and tell a friend! And don't forget to follow along/tweet at:

#LoveAndDarkness
@TrevorNWhite

[Turtlekid1]

Ordered my copy.  It might actually be partially funded by an album purchase from the author, considering I used PayPal.  >_>

But yeah, lookin' forward.

[ShadowBrain]

Thank you! It'll be in the mail today.

[Turtlekid1]

Got it just now, will start reading soon.

[Turtlekid1]

Because I'm feeling lazy and forgot to post that I had finished and liked this book, I'm going to repost a review I wrote for my school's literary magazine (tough luck, it didn't make the cut):

If you wanted to pick the two topics that are basically ubiquitous in fiction of the last couple decades, you’d be hard-pressed to come up with more fitting ones than "love" and "darkness."  Thankfully, Love and Darkness by Trevor White is an exploration of both those things that does well for itself, rather than falling into their tired and clichéd cousins, Obsession and Angst.  Instead, Love and Darkness functions as a sort of reclaiming work for topics that have been trashed time and again of late, and thought to have entered the… ahem… twilight of their glory.

I personally found the prose works of this book to be the most engaging, with most or all of them nicely subverting or playing upon concepts and tropes of which its audience has probably seen a lot.  The stories are all self-contained and vary in length from a couple of pages to over twenty for the longest, but the pacing doesn’t suffer for it.  The voice used in the prose is quite matter-of-fact; think J.K. Rowling’s very clear narrative style, perhaps not so wry every step of the way as Douglas Adams' work but often just as surreal.  The oddities and quirks in every story function nicely; and while the premises are sometimes old hat for a well-read audience, they show the author’s talent for executing them in interesting ways.  I especially recommend "The Agents of Fear" and "Distribution Methods."

Although I’m less for poetry than prose, the poems found here are lots of fun too.  They tend to be more focused on the "love" part of things than the "darkness," but the language is varied and the wordplay contains a few nice surprises here and there.  Special mention goes to "By All Means."

In a nutshell, Love and Darkness delivers what the title indicates and more, well-written and served up with a side of surrealism.  As a side note, I’m not a fan of the cover, which is kind of visually messy.  Definitely enjoyed everything on the paper underneath it, though.  I think you might too.

[ShadowBrain]

Why, thank you! I suppose they might not have thought a review for a relatively obscure work would get many reads, but maybe you can post it on your blog instead...

As for the cover... yeah, I had something more interesting in mind, but as a long-distance collaboration between myself and a busy graphic designer, a little "settling" occured for the sake of an end-of-2012 release date. Though I think he did an excellent job with Distortions, his work in sculpture and painting has seemed much stronger to me than his 2D cover work for whatever reason. Might fly solo on the next one. :/

[ShadowBrain]

Updated original post with a link to L&D Playlist. Please do check it out!

[ShadowBrain]

Ebook has finally been released exclusively for Kindle! Check out the new link above in the main post!

[ShadowBrain]

Mega-bump: After much soul-searching, I decided to go and actually make that book look good on Kindle! That, and I fixed some typos, which I count as cutting the less-great entries. Give it a look if you haven't already, and spread the word!

http://www.amazon.com/Love-Darkness-Vol-Trevor-White-ebook/dp/B00BME0ROW/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8