The Novel Approach

Incendiary (Wolf’s-own #4) by Carole Cummings

“…when you really love something, then it loves you back, in whatever way it has to love.” – John Knowles, A Separate Peace

And sometimes the same applies to someone, and that alone has to be good enough because to expect anything more is asking too much of the one you love. To want anything less devalues the gift of that love. To beg for it because you so badly need it in order to feel alive, leaves room to doubt that it’s real. To be able to recognize it, not the words but the actions that signify it, gives it legitimacy. To be able to accept love in whatever form it’s offered because it’s the only way that person is capable of offering it, gives it strength. Simply because a man’s soul can’t afford the price of the words to express it doesn’t diminish the emotion. Sometimes actions and the motivations behind them are thoroughly eloquent all on their own.

For Fen, Jacin, Jacin-rei; the Incendiary, the Catalyst, the Untouchable who wanted…no, that’s wrong…who needed nothing more than to be touched (because a need is an imperative); the unlovable who is loved in spite of how much he feels unworthy of it; the man who has been taught, across lifetimes, that love can only mean betrayal; for that man, existence is a curse. For him, love is pain. His sacrifice is to live; his punishment is to be denied that which he craves to his very core; his affliction is to need and to be needed but to be unable to receive and to give freely; each death is nothing more than a path to rebirth to begin the cycle of torment over and over again, and each lifetime becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, doomed to repeat itself because that torment robs him of his sanity.

“My kind were not meant for the love of another, but that could not stop me from wanting it, so I watched for it very carefully.”

But watching for it is very different from recognizing it, and recognizing it is very different from accepting it, because in a world where every boon must be balanced by a forfeit, how can one man possibly be both the gift and the sacrifice? So you doom yourself to repeat the same mistakes indefinitely, you convince yourself that if you try harder to be perfect, you’ll be loved perfectly. But the person you love doesn’t love you, he only wants to possess you. He wants your soul because to own it, to twist and brutalize it until it lays shriveled and dying in the darkest shadows of your very being means you have no value but to the one who wants to use you. It means you’ve given away everything of yourself and of your Self, and you become nothing but a tool to be manipulated by whomever can make you believe the worst possible lies about who you are and why you even exist.

Until, that is, you find the someone whose arms become the someplace you feel safe. Until you find the purpose of your life is to live your life purposefully. Until you discover the truth behind the lie that has been your existence. Until you find someone who wants to lay claim to you, not because he wants to use you or enslave you but because he wants to protect you and offer you the freedom to choose your own path. Until you unlearn all you’ve been taught and stop fighting against the one who can save you. Only then can you be redeemed.

And only then do you discover there is more than one way to save a soul, but no one ever said the soul that’s saved must be your own in order for you to find salvation. No one ever said the heart’s blood you protect must be your own heart’s blood. Sometimes the soul you save is the one you’re entrusted with, and the only way you have to love is to guard that soul with your life. You keep it safe because that’s how you love. And that has to be enough because it’s all of yourself you have to give.

It is redemption. It is a story of oppression. It is the magic and the mythology of mortals and immortals. It is the mythos of the Six, who usurped the One to become the gods of the world. It is the story of the One who returns to seek vengeance and to regain control of the world that rejected him. It is the story of the children of the gods who carry out the gods’ orders and ensure the balance between the mortals and the immortals. It is the story of an immortal who must discover who he’s meant to be so he can guide the inception to his conclusion so he can begin anew, to fulfill a legacy of becoming the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end, the god-maker and –slayer, the world-changer and –destroyer, to become more than the Incendiary has ever been before. It is the story of a man who was created to be a tool of Fate, Fate’s Fool, who was betrayed by his lover-god and died a thousand small deaths as penance for defying that god who’d claimed to love his Incendiary but proved with savage equanimity that his love came with conditions.

Wolf’s-own is the saga of three brothers who love in whatever way they have to love—one loves a brother who no longer is, or maybe never was; one loves without provision, even if his actions and words say otherwise; and one has no idea how to love, because to love means to lose. To love means to need. To need means to suffer.

Incendiary is the final chapter in an epic tale that spans the journey of two heroes. It is the end of the beginning, the beginning of the end, the full-circle story of the gods’ and their playthings and the malevolence and manipulation of immortals who would pervert the old magic in a bid to take over the world.

Wolf’s-own is an experience; that’s all there is to say. It is a journey for the reader, the story of a man who was ordered to steal the heart’s blood of an immortal but ended up only stealing his heart instead, and gaining a soul to protect in return for all that he’d lost of his own. There is the Balance.

I loved this series, from inception to conclusion, connected with it in a way I don’t connect with many books, and this is the only way I have to show it.

Buy Incendiary HERE.

Koan (Wolf’s-own #3) by Carole Cummings

I think I’ll just take a Xanax and a bottle of gin and go curl up in a corner now because, let me tell you, if I didn’t have some sort of anxiety disorder before reading Koan, I think I do now.

I was going to make that my review. Just that. But please, I could never limit myself to just that where this series is concerned. It’s too much fun to try and analyze it, for me not to give it my full and undivided love and attention.

Years ago, I read a book by the late Joseph Campbell titled The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Originally published in 1949, Mr. Campbell set out to formulate a template for the hero’s journey, one in which the name of the hero doesn’t really matter because he is every one. What matters is the journey itself and how the protagonist of the story progresses through his or her quest, suffers all the trials and heartbreaks, dies the spiritual death, is purified, is reborn, and ultimately achieves a oneness of body and soul to collect the boon at the journey’s end. Now, that’s not to say that Joseph Campbell originated the concept of the monomyth, only that he named it and drew the lines to show the archetypes and alchemy of that journey. Since I read this, as well as his book The Power of Myth, I have to say I’ve never looked at another book in quite the same way again. In fact, I think I quit reading altogether. Now I just obsess.

And Jacin is my latest obsession. Jacin himself is a template. He is a trinity. He is the hero with three faces who has died a thousand small deaths. He is Fen and Jacin and Jacin-rei. He is Incendiary and Catalyst and Untouchable. And somehow, some way, this deadly beauty must find a way to tie all he is together and make peace with the scar that is his soul so that he may be reborn yet again. But now, he must carry on with this journey alone, to discover how to be human—not again, but for the first time. For the first time, he has given someone the gift of his name, his true name, because somewhere deep inside, he knows his name will be safe on the tongue of the one to whom he’s gifted it. The name is not insignificant, in spite of what one would have Jacin believe. Jacin has received the talisman, the unspoken promise of protection against the danger through which he is about to pass, that will help him in his quest, until the one who gifted it to him can return—I hope as the ultimate gift for Jacin.

Jacin has learned that in order to gain, he must also lose. That’s the Balance of Fate in the world in which he lives. If Jacin wants and hopes and needs and reaches out, it can be destroyed, so he’s learned not to allow himself the impulse. He has learned that he cannot want, because if he wants, he hopes; if he hopes, he feels; if he feels, he is vulnerable. If he’s vulnerable, he can no longer hide in the shadows because the shadows are no longer a part of who he is. He is exposed, raw, frightened, in pain, and once again a target and a tool in a deadly game between the gods and the banpair, the energy vampires who feed upon the power of emotions, and Jacin is their all-you-can-eat-buffet.

Sometimes the best way to describe what something is, is to describe what it isn’t. Jacin isn’t whole. He isn’t crazy, nor is he sane. He isn’t untouchable, nor is he unlovable. He isn’t perfect, nor is he invincible. He has been touched and he has been loved, but he isn’t ready to accept that he is worthy of either, nor does he know how to get to that point of acceptance yet. He isn’t a fool, nor is he free. He has not discovered that his life has meaning because he has not yet discovered the meaning of his life. He isn’t the Ghost, but he isn’t quite human either. Jacin isn’t your archetypical hero. He must fly to fall and fall to fly–to do that, he must let go.

”It is yours to reach for the light.” Jacin must find the light to escape the shadows. And I hope its brilliance is enough to burn away the damage of all that he’s endured. I hope that light is incendiary.

Buy Koan (Wolf’s-own #3) HERE.

Small Gems – Rapport by Carole Cummings

The children of the gods play their games, sometimes very dangerous games in which winning means escaping with one’s life. But sometimes those games are little more than an unconcealed pleasure to show superiority over the weak and the helpless who can be controlled and manipulated, trespassed against simply because it can be done. Or maybe it was merely a test, an attempt to find an answer to the question, why him?

It’s been made very clear that Kamen Malick is unlike the gods’ other children, and it’s that difference that made him first a curiosity, easily misjudged, certainly underestimated as the immortal who is weakened by his humanity; then an ally, then more to Skel, who has been, until now, little more than a ghostly presence in the series and whose death has haunted Malick.

Skel was the stepping stone which began Asai’s path to Fen Jacin-rei. He was a tool and a sacrifice in a bid for superiority and domination, and the price he paid was steep.

There’s an undeniable urge to recommend Rapport even if you’ve never read a single word of the Wolf’s-own series. It’s one thing to be able to read and appreciate a story for its rich atmosphere and lush writing, but it’s entirely another to read a story about characters you know nothing about and may not appreciate unless you know something about the world they inhabit and the ways in which they struggle to discover who they are and what their purpose is in the grand scheme of things.

There’s something to be said for seduction, though, and there’s no question this is a seductive scene. Maybe this free short is exactly the sort of enticement you need to draw you into an entirely provocative world. I’m so glad I’m already there.

Download Rapport FREE HERE.

Wolf’s-own Book Two: Weregild by Carole Cummings

Forfeit. Collateral Damage.

In a megalomaniac’s bid for supremacy, it was inevitable. It seems there’s a price to pay for everything in this world, and the currency is nothing less than a man’s very soul.

Fen Jacin-rei is the pawn through which other players wish to manipulate this game. He is the tool, the sacrifice player that will be used in a bid for ultimate power, used in an effort to find redemption, to destroy evil, to communicate with the past, to keep him tethered to the present, to prove to himself that he is worthy of being loved, to show him that he is neither perfect nor a failure, certainly not a perfect failure, but that he is simply human. That he is real.

Sometimes manipulating the game itself is the only way to sway the players, but the problem with continuing to change the rules and attempting to outmaneuver the man who often tries to be someone else, as well as the man who tries to be everything he was taught to be, for bad or for worse, is that one could never possibly anticipate and correct for all the variables of the game. And sometimes the price for that failure is your life.

The problem with persistent calculating is that there is then always room for miscalculation, and underestimating the enemy is ever a danger. Where there is coolly calculated evil, there should be the right and the fair and the just to balance the scales. Evil always seems to underestimate the power behind the need for justice, but how can there be Balance without it? And the greatest miscalculation in this sinister game may be to assume who is Jacin-rei’s heart. It is a supremely perilous risk to take, thinking you have all the answers, because even Jacin-rei doesn’t hold the piece that fits into that puzzle yet. But he is close. So close.

Fen Jacin-rei is the moth that will choose to fly away from the flame because his sacrifice, his forfeit, is to live. What happens when the moth changes course, quits flying toward the flame that portends its certain death and begins to redirect his own fate? When he believes in the nothing he’s been taught he is, he returns to Zero. “Unraveling. Shattering. Undone. Unmade.” The problem with Zero, however, is that as soon as it encounters even a small fraction of something, it can no longer be nothing. It immediately becomes more and is transformed into something new, even if he believes that that something is little more than a pretty lie. The Untouchable wants nothing more than to be touched in spite of how much he loathes himself for that need. Seems the unlovable also wants nothing more than to be loved in spite of how much he resents those who inspire that need in him.

But Fen is the conduit and it is through him that so much is possible and reality is precarious and it is a danger to attempt to predict the unpredictable. He must depend upon borrowed sanity because he has been burdened with a madness that is not his own; he needs the quiet that can be borrowed from the Null. For everything there must be balance and for everything there is a price, even if that price is your Self, paid in the form of submitting to the needs you hate and the relief that comes from the man you can’t trust.

The pain of grief overwhelms the ability to feel the pain of punishment and proves there is a difference between living and merely existing. Existence is the breeze, but living is the hurricane wind that sweeps you along in its wake and proves that you’ve experienced something that will continue to alter and influence you for all Time. It is up to Fen to decide how to escape the noose of his former reality and use it to capture some semblance of a life. He will live as a form of revenge against the betrayal that has dogged his steps. He will live for those he’s lost and for those who remain, until he learns how to live for himself.

Through the sandpaper eyelids that come from staying up into the wee hours, reading; through the irregular heartbeats, the increased blood pressure, the anxiety, the heartbreak and hope for what is yet to come, I flew and I fell and I joyfully survived this journey.

And now I wait to see what will become of them: Malick and Jacin, Joori, Morin, Samin and Shig. I will mourn their losses and cheer their successes until next time. I hope I’ll have recovered by then.

Buy Wolf’s-own Book Two: Weregild HERE.

Ghost: Wolf’s-own (Book One) by Carole Cummings

Oh, the Booyah! that is this book. Eden Winters, you know me so well.

How irresistible is the number one? As in Chapter One, Book One, the beginning, the nervous anticipation and sometimes trepidation I feel when I start a new book and series from an author I’ve never read before. There are so many variables, so many unknowns—will I love it, like it, feel entirely ambivalent toward it, or will I outright hate it? It’s like starting out on a blind journey down a dark and unfamiliar path, with no system in place to navigate the possible pitfalls and inclines I’ll surely face with each new chapter, nothing other than my own wits and hope that when I finish, that path isn’t littered with too many squandered opportunities or too much misspent time.

Mostly I get lucky. Sometimes I don’t.

Right now, I’m feeling like I hit the literary lotto.

Carole Cummings has just joined a short list of authors who, when I read their work for the first time, I knew I was onto something kind of special, authors who put their personal stamps of ownership upon the sub-genres in which they write, as I was left in jaw dropping wonder at the skill and finesse with which she wielded her words, threading the loom, each chapter a slow and enticing revelation, until finally the entire picture could be seen, and it was stunning.

Ghost: Wolf’s-own (Book One) is just the beginning of what promises to be an epic adventure of danger and betrayal, of mistrust and abuse of trust. This is the story of men and women who play their parts in the manipulations and machinations between the gods and their children, the Ancestors and the Untouchable, and the Blood magic they use to control and to sacrifice, for sinister and secretive purposes.

There are definitive sides and there are neutral zones in this eloquently fascinating world, places in which one can linger only long enough to decide on which side of the line he will fall. The time is coming (March 26th, to be exact) to discover who will dominate and who will defeat, who will survive and who will perish in this game where choosing sides may be entirely detrimental to one’s health.

Family will be the key in so much of what is yet to come—a family by birth and a family that could be chosen, if only there were room to trust in the feelings that are drowned by the voices of the spirits and the abuse of authority and the warping and twisting of a boy’s own needs and wants against him, until he is little more than a shell, a weapon devoid of self, bereft of a connection to his own sense of worth. He is the Ghost, the visible wraith who slips into and out of shadows. He is the Untouchable who wants nothing more than to be touched in spite of how much he loathes himself for that need.

There is one who wishes to touch him, who wants to touch his heart and awaken the feelings that died long ago. That is, if that man does not become the Ghost’s executioner.

March 26th suddenly seems so far away.

Buy Ghost: Wolf’s-own (Book One) HERE