Can you tell us a little bit about your latest book? When did it come out? Where can we get it?
Is there anything that prompted your latest book? Something that inspired you?
The Witch of the Wood came from a scholastic place, as dry as that might appear. I am a college professor, and there has been much dialogue of late concerning love and marriage, specifically in reference to the relatively new (and radical) idea that we should marry for love, and not necessarily interests of family positioning. It made me wonder why we would assume that a gushing, first feeling of love would last over time, and while I am a romantic at heart, one cannot avoid the logical fallacy. I imagined that once women could change according to need, at least in a fantasy scenario, and hence, I had the premise for a hot, sexy (and frightening) book.
Great!
So, when did you know you wanted to write? Or has it always been a pastime of yours?
I decided to write when I was thirty and I realized it was one of the only ways to make a statement without compromise.
Do you have any favorite authors?
Stephen King for his uncanny ability to find the inner core of a character. J.R.R. Tolkien for story. Ernest Hemingway for his blunt syntax (and ironic rambling sentences used for counterpoint), and Tamara Thorne for her setting descriptions (among other things).
Oh! Incidentally, we have had Tamara Thorne on here before. She'll be returning to Writing in the Modern Age in May. ;)
So, do you write in a specific place? Time of day?
I write in my
home office on my desktop computer. I
write best from 5:00 in the morning until noon.
Never after 5:00 in the evening.
All right. Every writer knows what works and doesn't work for him or her.
Are there any words you'd like to impart to fellow writers? Any advice?
That's great advice. We should all stay true to ourselves.
Thank you so much for stopping by to visit us today here at Writing in the Modern Age, Michael. It was such a pleasure having you. :)
Readers, here is the blurb for The Witch of the Wood.Rudy Barnes, an adjunct professor no longer young, thinks he is attending a routine faculty meeting when he is struck by the beautiful April Orr, an administrator who is giving a presentation at the meeting. He is even more amazed when, after the meeting, he finds himself going with April to her house and having an intense sexual encounter with her.
This is the beginning of a bizarre supernatural adventure in which April, a “witch of the wood,” explains to Rudy the true origin of the female of the species. Rudy must now team up with Wolfie, the child he bore from April, and his ex-wife, Pat, to battle cosmic forces who are seeking to destroy the witches and bring about a universal cataclysm.
In this gripping novel, Michael Aronovitz displays the crisp and riveting prose, the careful delineation of character, and the powerful horrific effects that have enlivened his previous novels and tales. In addition, he provides a thought-provoking mythic background to an epic struggle of good and evil.
Michael Aronovitz is the author of the acclaimed short story collections Seven Deadly Pleasures (Hippocampus Press, 2009) and The Voices in Our Heads (2013), as well as the novel Alice Walks (2013).
Here is an excerpt from the book.
First was the great rumbling, vibrations
that sent numbing shooters through Rudy’s feet, pebbles and dirt seemingly from
nowhere rolling and threading down the hill toward the shed, Patricia’s plywood
work board trembling and shivering on its supports, then falling off at an odd
angle. Next was the rocking, the skyline
come alive, trees all around pitching to and fro as if engulfed in some strange
hurricane that painted arcs on the horizon.
From beneath, there were great pulling
sounds, stretching, yawning, a muffled army of high tension bows being drawn as
the massive network of intertwined root systems strained to the absolute
breaking point.
Then the earth erupted, a million buried
circus whips cracking all at once as the embedded, roots ripped up from
underfoot in a damp throaty roar, soil coming up in bursts and cascades,
peppering the house, showering all around Rudy Barnes who covered his face with
his forearm.
He thought he heard screams: a neighbor
walking a dog maybe, a jogger, who knew?
It got drowned out quickly by the fantastic collapse, the purging of the
skyline as every tree came crashing down to the earth.
Rudy was lucky he was not killed. The border elms like the slats of some
massive gate-barrier thundered down in a diagonal pattern, first smashing
through the roof atop the detached garage, then the kitchen and laundry room,
the rose garden, and all along the hill Rudy was sidestepping down, the ground
feeling like shuffling floorboards in a funhouse. Rudy turned and tried to run. A gargantuan trunk pounded the ground missing
him by inches, and he dove off to the right.
The weeping willow on the far side of the back yard smashed down into
the shed turning it to splinters and three trees plunged across Rudy’s path a
few feet ahead of where he had fallen to his stomach. He covered his head with his hands for a
moment, the scratches and abrasions up his forearms wet and stinging.
The thunderous booming of it was
overwhelming, rolling shockwaves pounding the ground, a riotous tumult that
felt like the end of the world. It
reached a tremendous peak, then slowed, thinned out and scattered to isolated
shivers, the final showers of soil and rock pelting down, then drizzling off
like an engine ticking down as it cooled.
There were dull echoes. There was aftermath silence, but then came a
mad skittering in the grass. Rudy raised
his head and there, coming on at ground level from the felled ruin of the wood
beyond the iron fence, was a mad rush of wildlife flooding over and between the
crooked nest of trunks and branches: white and grey field mice, chipmunks,
squirrels, rabbits, gophers, small foxes, deer, all jumping and crawling over
each other in a mass exodus from a world that had been turned inside-out.
There were more screams now from over
the hill, honking horns, cars crashing into things with gritty finality, hoarse
shouts.
“Good acoustics all of a sudden,” Rudy
thought wildly, as he pushed to his feet and made for the tool shed, its opened
back corner still standing on its own like some ancient monolith. He moved, climbed, stepped across the jigsaw
of foliation, lost his footing and raked his shin, then doggie paddled over to
the “monument.” The catty-cornered
shelves had held, and Rudy swiped the remains of a collection of gardening trowels
to the ground along with a stack of clay flower pots. He climbed two shelves high and wrapped his
arms around the corner post for dear life.
The evacuation swarmed underneath him,
yipping and rustling, and what looked like a bear cub loped right past his
ankle nipping and snapping at the air.
The mass covered the hill, a rippling hoard of clawing, retreating
hindquarters that scurried off to the jungle that had become Hampstead and Elm
Avenues and beyond.
The dust and dirt that had risen in the
air was now settling to a resinous haze.
There was almost a dramatic pause then, like the time for a deep breath
where one could take inventory, cut his losses, and measure his options.
But along the slope of the near hill
there was new movement. A sneaky sort of
creeping.
It was a spread of strange coloring, an
outpouring, and Rudy’s breath caught in his throat. Bone white hands and arms were creeping out
of the holes in the ground, skeletal fingers feeling about the perimeters, palms
settling, then pressing, and then was the emergence.
Rudy focused on the closest cavity
across the yard, where an elm had toppled down across the forest gate, bending
the corner into a twisted black dog-ear.
Back at its dark uncorked root-cellar, a form pushed out of the hole,
black beetles and other vermin swimming off her in a sort of unveiling, white
skin stretched bone tight and spotted with filth, tangle of black hair peppered
with dirt. Her bulbous black eyes
shuttered open and closed in reaction to the glare of the sun, and she pushed
up to a standing position, bony knees almost buckling.
Her hand was at her forehead then, in a
protective salute to shield her sensitive eyes, and Rudy noticed
something. He still had a clear view of
her face in an odd, sort of bare perspective.
“No
shadow,” he thought.
She let her hands fall to her sides, and
took a step forward, careful not to touch branch, leaf, nor stalk of the prison
column that had held her underground for so long. She gave a slight curtsy, and then said in a
voice rough with dirt, “Rudy.
Rudy…Barnes.”
Author Bio
Michael Aronovitz
has been writing horror fiction since 2009. Along with his two
collections and two novels, he has published short stories and critical
articles in a variety of magazines. In 2011 his short story "How
Bria Died" appeared in Paula Guran's "The Year's Best Dark Fantasy
and Horror, and in 2014 his short story "The Girl Between the Slats"
appeared in S.T. Joshi's "Searchers After Horror" anthology.
Aronovitz is a Professor of English and lives in Pennsylvania with his
wife Kim and their son Max.
Books:
Author Links:
Website/Blog: http://michaelaronovitz.weebly.com/
Amazon: http://amzn.to/1FgSTou
Books:
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