Second Look: There Is Pain Here

tyunglebower ♦ June 13, 2024 ♦ Leave a comment

To date the most full-fledge fantasy novel I’ve written is There Is Pain Here.

I’d call it a sort of historical fantasy, but for the fact that such refers to a specific and established subgenera with characteristics my novel does not have.

Nevertheless, it is a fantasy story, and the protagonist is a historical figure: the 20th president of the United States and victim of assassination, James Garfield.

The story is mostly set in the afterlife, or at least a version of a it. An in-between state for certain souls called “The Overlap.”

Upon his death bed, James is recruited to this state, to help fight malevolent forces that are bent on destroying or taking over not just that part of reality, but all parts.

But first he must learn to walk talk and fight as a spirit does in this realm, not as one would with a corporal body during life on earth.

Garfield in our world is a more obscure figure now, but his tomb Cleveland, Ohio, (which I visited prior to finishing the book) is testament not just to his life, but to the esteem in which the country held him art the time of his death. (Being the second president felled by a bullet in living memory, after Lincoln.)

I had wanted to write a fantasy story featuring historical figures at some point, and had even made early notes for a different story with a different person. But something about Garfield, and the circumstances of his death won out.

A somewhat flawed man, I found him nonetheless fascinating in a number of ways. His brilliance with languages and mathematics. His stance on corruption in government. Some of his pithy quotations. His use of his advanced mind to navigate a whole new reality appealed to me. (Shifting his every day more than a few inches in this case…)

Plus, it is that relative obscurity that I mentioned that made him ideal for this tale. Lincoln himself is over done in fiction, and even in fantasy fiction. (He visits the bardo, fights vampires, etc,) No, a worthy but lesser known president, usually related to a pub trivia answer, was the type of presence I wanted in The Overlap.

More than anything else, however, his haunting last words sealed the deal. They are reported to have been, “There is pain here.” I asked myself what if he were not referring to his body, or even to an afterlife as we understood, but to the circumstances in The Overlap that convinced him he had to be of service to people there, if he could not longer serve the people on earth.

Hence the title.

It was quite freeing to world build without worrying about the accuracies of streets and roads, or even weather patterns and physics. The world could behave in whatever way I chose, and that was something I had not yet experimented with in novel form at the time.

And for fun, I even included a few historical notes at the end about the real Garfield and how he compared to my version, for which I did more research than usual for a novel.

The cover is simple a photo of the real Garfield that I put together myself. I thought about spending money once again to hire the same professional designer that I worked with for The Beacons I See, but for whatever reason that feel through, and the notion of the minimalist approach appealed to me.

I hope the whole book appeals to you. It is available in ebook form for $2.00 at present. There is a paperback version on Amazon for 7.00, though it has a different cover as in that case it was last minute to make it a paperback for the benefit of a specific party, and I saw no need to make it off the market after the fact.