Peana At'romond is a novel about the great divide, the complication that may be the after-life and our relationship with it, and what we think it could be.
Through a damning gypsy's curse, a Scots-born female rogue, savage inexplicable accidents, murder and two of the oldest sexual dysfunctions known to civilisation, Peana At'romond chronicles a few months in the life and close family of a bewitching, heavily-pregnant, Cornish-bred herbalist, whose life is not entirely guiltless.
Besides a story, it is also a succession of events, lies, discussions and an unwholesome pointer to the mystery of what may lie in wait for us after we die: you can trust the chronicler or you can trust yourself.
Peana At'romond is a self-contained maze, a story of passion and determination involving poisoning, manslaughter, spiritualism, explosives and rage. But who is the narrator? What is his abhorrent secret and why is he so personally judgmental?
Its style is deliberately capricious. Since language is a living expression of thought and writing is a graphic expression of the same, in Peana At'romond, I have used words to form speed bumps and incursions, to introduce disinformation and to interrupt the normal smooth flow of consciousness. Yet, the story itself is lucid and manageable.
The intention, to a unconscious degree, is to introduce confusion; for the reader to feel there is something askew outside of the flat words on the paper, as well as reflecting the maze that is the main subject matter; the afterlife.
Trusting an author's use of words is paramount but here there is a deliberate lack of assurance. The sensation of the novel is abstract; to reflect the subject and therefore, distractions, untruths and deceptions abound throughout.
Words are deliberately and unusually used, and placed in order to cause the readers world, not the world on the paper, to reel.