See below to read an excerpt and a great Interview. And ...to sign up for the GIVEAWAY
It's a monstrous maze
of a mansion, built by a grief-ridden heiress. A tour guide, about to retire,
has given his spiel for so many years that he's gone blind. On this last tour,
he's slammed with second sight.
He sees the ghosts he's
always felt were there: the bedeviled heiress, her servants, and a young
carpenter who lands his dream job only to become a lifelong slave to her
obsession. The workman's wife makes it to shore, but he's cast adrift.
And the tour guide
comes home to his cat.
The pairing of Bishop
and Fuller is a magical one. . . . It’s a brilliant opus, melding the past,
present, and future with intimate, individual viewpoints from a tightly arrayed
cast of believable characters in as eerie a setting as might be dredged out of
everyman’s subconscious searching. . . . Blind Walls offers a weird alternative
world, featuring a blind man with second sight and an acerbic wit as its
charming, empathic hero.
—Feathered Quill
These characters are so
well developed that one has to think of them as live people – laughing with
them and crying with them, even getting old with them. This is an amazing story based on the
Winchester Mansion and told with such quiet, compelling, raw humanity that the
reader simply can’t stop until the entire tale is told. A wonderful, spooky look into others lives
and what may or may not happen on any given day.
—Dog-Eared Reviews
Bishop and Fuller have
constructed a story rich with imagined detail and visionary ideas about life’s
possibilities. The cast of ghostly characters, servants, workman, and family
light up the story with dramatic effect as their actions and choices are
observed. . . . The authors’ prose is effortless and moves easily from humorous
to weighted seriousness. The dialogue is perceptive, giving voice to compelling
characters and particularly to the tour guide whose second sight he confers on
the readers. The latter will not want to look away from the myriad rooms of
Weatherlee House.
—US Review of Books
Read an excerpt...
I was surprised at the old woman’s humor—far better than
mine. Ghosts are known for their moans and clatters but not for their jokes.
She should be the tour guide, I thought, and I the haunted heiress.
We had walked miles from the sealed-off wing. Burrows
branched like arteries meandering out from the beast’s dead heart. A blank wall
twenty yards ahead would dog-leg toward another blank wall twenty yards ahead.
I led, they followed—an odyssey within a hamster wheel. In my bones it was
precisely 4:53 p.m. but each minute took years. My ghosts were aging fast.
The corridor bent, doubled back, made a squiggle of jogs,
then opened to a hall that stretched like the endless trudge between airport
terminals. When had this vast new suburb come into being? Had Weatherlee House
consumed orchards, colonized neighbors, licked whole valleys with its thick
coated tongue? Or might we be in those underground shadowlands where they store
the great bombs for Last Judgment? I could hear the deep whine of missiles
rising.
I saw a dim figure, an ambient smudge whom I seemed to be
following. It was Chuck, a silhouette in a well-tailored suit. His gait was
lumbering, tense, as if pretending calm while pursued by a bear. At intervals
he passed through sharp light and I could see his rigid face. A lamp shone at
the end of the passage. He paused, entered the room. I came forward with my
breathless gaggle of goslings.
Click HERE to read an insightful interview of the authors.
AUTHOR Bio and Links:
Conrad Bishop
& Elizabeth Fuller’s 60+ plays have been produced Off-Broadway, in regional
theatres, and in thousands of their own performances
coast to coast. Their two public radio series Family Snapshots and Hitchhiking
off the Map have been heard nationally. Their books include two previous novels
(Realists and Galahad’s Fool), a memoir (Co-Creation: Fifty Years in the
Making), and two anthologies of their plays (Rash Acts: 35 Snapshots for the
Stage and Mythic Plays: from Inanna to Frankenstein.)
They host a
weekly blog on writing, theatre, and life at www.DamnedFool.com. Their theatre
work is chronicled at www.IndependentEye.org. Short videos of their theatre and
puppetry work are at www.YouTube.com/indepeye. Bishop has a Stanford Ph.D.,
Fuller is a college drop-out, but somehow they see eye to eye. They have been
working partners and bedmates for 57 years.
Website:
http://www.damnedfool.com/
Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/indepeye/
Conrad Bishop
Amazon Page:
https://www.amazon.com/s?i=stripbooks&rh=p_27%3AConrad+Bishop&s=relevancerank&text=Conrad+Bishop&ref=dp_byline_sr_book_1
Elizabeth
Fuller Amazon Page: https://www.amazon.com/s?i=stripbooks&rh=p_27%3AElizabeth+Fuller&s=relevancerank&text=Elizabeth+Fuller&ref=dp_byline_sr_book_2
Conrad Bishop
Goodreads:
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4352.Conrad_Bishop
Elizabeth
Fuller Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4350.Elizabeth_Fuller
Conrad Bishop
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/conrad.bishop
Elizabeth
Fuller Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lizful
Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/925035
Thanks for hosting!
ReplyDeleteSounds like a good book.
ReplyDeleteSounds like my kind of book!
ReplyDelete