Urbantasm Book Three The Darkest Road by Connor Coyne - General Fiction / Young Adult - Urbantasm: The Empty Room is the third book in the magical teen noir serial novel inspired by the author’s experiences growing up in and around Flint, Michigan. It will be published in September, 2021.


Urbantasm Book Three
The Darkest Road
by Connor Coyne

Genre: General Fiction / Young Adult
Subgenres: Magical Realism, Teen Noir, Edgy YA
Publisher: Gothic Funk Press
Date of Publication: 9/22/2021
ISBN: 978-0989920292 (Print)
Page Count 639
Word Count: About 230,000
Cover Artist: Sam Perkins-Harbin

Urbantasm: The Empty Room is the third book in the magical teen noir serial novel inspired by the author’s experiences growing up in and around Flint, Michigan. It will be published in September, 2021.

Junior high was hard. John Bridge has made and lost friends, experienced and forsaken love, and discovered his true passions. But after his harrowing experience on the roof of St. Christopher’s hospital, John has decided to turn the page of his own life and plan for his future. Now he has new friends, a new girlfriend, and a powerful new goal: to get into Chicago and leave Akawe forever.

But Akawe might not want to let John go. The city is full of memories and ghosts — urbantasms, according his former friend Selby — and they leave traces of questions that John cannot easily escape: What happened to his abducted classmate Cora Braille? How does the Chalks street gang keep replenishing its stock of O-Sugar, a drug with seemingly magical properties? And why is Selby suddenly hanging out with a notorious drug dealer? Does it have anything to do with a man with a knife or some mysterious blue sunglasses?

John has a feeling that the dreadful answers to these questions might take him to a place that he does not want to go: a dark road in a forgotten corner of his dying city. Possibly the darkest road of all.


As a serial novel, Urbantasm has to be read in order. 
New readers will want to start with Book One The Dying City.

Interview with Connor Coyne

 Welcome to JB’s Bookworms with Brandy Mulder 

Tell us about your newest book.

The Darkest Road is the third book in the Urbantasm series, which follows John Bridge and his young friends as they tangle with magical drugs, threatening strangers, and youthful romance against the backdrop of a decaying industrial city.  The first book, The Dying City, begins when John steals a pair of strange blue sunglasses on the first day of junior high, plunging him into conflict with a mysterious man with a knife.

As grim as the first two books get, however, the third book is even more defined by its darknesses and shadowy spaces. The protagonists are in high school now. Their earlier innocent loves have been replaced by tangles with real emotional stakes. The dangers pursuing them have taken on an edge of real menace and violence.  The city is disintegrating around them, with factory closures, serial killers, spree arsonists, and a contaminated water supply. In the background, a nameless figure appears to be pulling all of the strings. For the first time, it seems that death is on the table.

Writing isn’t easy. What was the most difficult thing you dealt with when writing your newest book?

I started writing the Urbantasm series in 1996 at the age of 17, and I have been developing it ever since. Over the course of 25 years, a project can take on a lot of baggage, logistical and emotional.  Moreover, the market is always trying to steer you toward writing that is trendy, while your own impulses are to never compromise. If you give into the first temptation, you lose the soul of your story, but if you give into the second, you produce a lot of bad writing that people don’t want to read.  The trick is in balancing the urgency of the story you need to tell and the story your readers crave to read. This isn’t cut-and-dried; it involves a thousand little judgment calls you have to make every time you sit down to edit or revise. Keeping my focus on that important goal over so long was the most challenging thing as I brought Urbantasm to publication.

Tell us a little bit about your writing career.

I started writing in 1987-ish, when my father bought an IBM-286 computer with a word processor.  I got serious about it in high school, when I started writing plays for local theater groups and poetry for student publications. I started Urbantasm early on, but it wasn’t until after college that I realized that my real passion was for writing fiction.

In 2005, I went to the New School in New York to earn my MFA in Creative Writing, and I got to work with extraordinary writers like Jeffery Renard Allen and Mark Bibbins during my time there.  In 2010, I published my first novel Hungry Rats, a second-person noir, followed by Shattering Glass, a psychedelic romp through a haunted college. I also put out Atlas, a collection of short stories. My nonfiction about my hometown (and current home) of Flint, Michigan has been published by Vox.com, Belt Magazine, and elsewhere.

They say Hind-sight is 20/20. If you could give advice to the writer you were the first time you sat down to write, what would it be?

Don’t take yourself too seriously. Read the work of living writers, and then get in touch with them. Don’t become too focused on writer superstars; there are geniuses living a mile down the road.  But I wouldn’t have listened to me; I thought I had it all figured out.

What was your most difficult scene to write?

I don’t want to give away the scenes where this has come into play, but I think readers are able to recognize when a scene is written from the heart and the gut.

My fiction isn’t autobiographical, but it is directly inspired by my own experiences, and those of people close to me.  When a writer writes about a complicated or traumatic event, fiction overlaps with an act of witnessing: you’re essentially saying this happened, and asking the question: how do we act in a world where this happens?  It opens up a very serious set of questions about authenticity, representation, social change, history, and narrative.  This is in addition to the typical writerly questions -- “is this compelling dialogue?” “does the action make sense?” “is this scene pushing the story forward?” -- which never go away.  The challenges seem insurmountable sometimes.

Are themes a big part of your stories, or not so much?

Themes are a starting point for me. In Urbantasm, for example, two of the central themes are being young and full-of-life in a place that is essentially dying, and the fact that all living things are in a state of change and flux for their entire existence. Once I had determined these themes, I started to discover the characters who were going to explore them, then the actions they would take, and finally the story they would create together.

What are you working on now?

Until the fourth and final Urbantasm book is published, it is taking up a lot of my time and energy.

However, I am also starting some sword-and-sorcery short stories.  They are set in an alternate universe where the land of Lichigan is corrupted and contaminated by an eldritch accountant. The main character is a woman named Shalm who has come down out of the North with a fear of being discovered. There is a lot I’m still figuring out, but I want it to be the same kind of glorious pulp I read when I was younger, by the likes of Michael Moorcock and Fritz Leiber.

Is there a release date planned?

Urbantasm, Book Four: The Spring Storm will be published in May 2022.

I am going to submit the Lichigan stories to some sci-fi and fantasy presses once they’re finished. If they pass on it, I’ll probably self-publish sometime next year.

Who is your favorite character from your own stories, and why?

Do you ever get the sense that certain characters aren’t ever really created, but are discovered? That they exist in your imagination, and in a weird way in reality, and that you can either write them right, or write them wrong, but there’s very little you can take credit for in their rendering except in perhaps recognizing and articulating their specialness.

There is a character introduced in Urbantasm, Book Three: The Darkest Road (although she has a cameo in Book One) named May who is very dear to me.  She is deeply flawed, as are all of the characters in Urbantasm, but there is something in the sincerity and clarity of her understanding of her world, and in her understanding of kindness that I find very rare in the real world, and very admirable. I often find myself trying to emulate May as I try to emulate real people who I know and respect.

Most writers were readers as children. What was your favorite book in grade school?

The Lord of the Rings and Madeleine L’Engles Time Quartet are the answers that have best stood the test of time.  But I also read a billion Dragonlance paperbacks that haven’t held up nearly as well.

What are your plans for future projects?

Urbantasm has been such a behemoth undertaking that I’m reluctant to take on anything huuuuuuge for a while.  But I’ve devoted the last twenty years to writing literary fiction, and I’d like to spend more time writing the sci-fi and fantasy that inspired me as a young reader.  I like the idea of taking an experimental literary approach to these genres, something that has been brilliantly realized by the Octavia Butlers, Ursula LeGuins, and Patrick Rothfusses of the world.  I’d kinda like to write an epic French Revolution-themed fantasy with dinosaurs and giant squirrels.

Is there anything you would like to add before we finish?

For 99.9% of writers, the work is not lucrative, and is often isolating and unrecognized.  So if you read something and like it, please let the writer know.  They will appreciate it more than you know.

Good luck with your newest release, and thank you for being with us today.

Thank you!


Excerpt Book 3:

The summer dusk gave way to interstitial twilight. There was no sense in riding an hour back home in the dark just to turn around and come back the next morning. Instead, my friends and I bummed our way back to Camp Jellystone, where we got to camp in tents on the gravel and weeds off of the RV lot for five dollars a night. We sat around a fire and drank pop while the older actors – our mentors – went through six-packs of beer and homilized on their atheist Bibles. They quoted SNL routines, Monty Python, GURPS, Cthulhu, and the Digital Underground until we were all too tired to see straight. We all said goodnight and made our way back to our tents. But my tent had flooded during the week, and inside I found dead earwigs floating in slow circles.
I didn’t mind.
I was glad that this had happened.
I gathered up my sleeping bag, which Eddie had dropped off in the morning before heading back to Akawe, and stumbled back through the purple dark to Omara’s tent.
“Knock knock,” I said.
I heard her sigh. “You got your own tent, John.”
“Not tonight,” I said. “It’s flooded. Will you let me stay here?”
“Fine,” she said. “If this ever gets back to my dad, he’ll murder you.”
“I don’t think he will. I don’t think he’d murder a fly.”
She didn’t argue. She knew that I was right. She unzipped the tent and beckoned me inside.
In more than a year of going out, Omara and I hadn’t had sex. We hadn’t even been naked together. The driving thirst and curiosity that I had felt in seventh grade had been quenched by my confusing tumbles with Crystal. By my guilty nescience with Lucy. Still, here I was, sleeping bag in hand, stooped under the slope of the tent roof, wearing soccer shorts and a too-small t-shirt, and Omara stood before me, more stooped because she was taller than I was, her white panties and tank top bright against her dark skin. We unzipped our sleeping bags, made a bed between them, and lay down. Omara turned away from me, and I pressed into her back. I put my arm around her waist with my palm against her bare stomach. I could feel her shapes against mine, though there was still cloth between us.
“It was a long day today,” she said.
“Uh-huh,” I said.
“We’d better get some sleep. It’s gonna be a long weekend. We got two more days to go. Then school. You know I got that job at the Olan Farm? It’s gonna be almost like this. I mean, I guess I’ll dress up like a milkmaid, like The Little House on the Prairie or something. But it’ll be acting, you know?”
I sighed.
“I’m not tired,” I said.
“Me neither,” she said. And then, in a burst: “I can’t stop thinking about that woman on your block. Who murdered her baby.”
I pushed myself against her. I held my breath. I said, “I can’t think about that. I mean. There’s nothing I can do about that. It makes me sick, but what does that even accomplish?”
“But doesn’t it just stick with you? The idea of it? How awful it –”
“I don’t want it to, okay? Anyway, it’s far away. We’re here now. Let’s stay here.”
“We can’t stay here.” I felt the tenseness in Omara’s back.
“Yeah. But someday, we’ll leave Akawe for good. And anyway. We aren’t there now.”
“Aren’t you afraid your dad’s gonna lose his job?”
“My father? Yeah. He’s already driving two hours each day ever since they transferred him to Canton. Ever since that strike ended last year, it seems like X is closing everything fast as they can. You know? I mean, they closed the Benedict Main. Most of the Old Benedict. Probably RAN, too. ‘Course, my aunt says they were going to close them all anyway.”
Omara laughed. A slight untensing. “Sounds like you have thought about it.”
“I think about lots of things a lot. Some things I don’t want to think about and some things I do. I mean, I think about you a lot.”
I was trying to move toward her. In, you know, ways. But she wasn’t taking the bait.
“Aren’t you afraid they won’t be able to pay for college?”
She’d finally succeeded. Omara’s fears had become my fears.
“No,” I said. “I mean, my mother is working at that new job at XAI. And even if my father gets laid off, he’s got options. Right? Transfer to other plants. Stuff like that. What about you? Why are you worried? Didn’t your grandparents get you a savings bond or something?”
“Yeah. But I keep thinking someone’s gonna open a trapdoor beneath me or something. I guess ... I guess I keep thinking I’ll believe in college when I get there. And not before. It just seems a bad idea to get my hopes up, you know?”
“You don’t have to worry about it for a while. It’s still years off. I mean, we just have to keep working, don’t we? It’ll happen. We just need to be patient or some shit, you know?”
The wind buffeted the tent over our heads. I could hear low talking outside. Low chuckles. Through the tent wall, I could see the embers of the fire flickering faintly. Some of the older actors would be slouching in their folding chairs until the sky started to gray with dawn. That was still several hours away. I listened to it for a long, slow minute.
“I do worry,” I confided. “I worry that something will happen that I don’t expect, and I’ll get stuck. That I’ll fail a class, fail a test I need to pass ... and I won’t get into college in Chicago, or I won’t get into college anywhere. I worry that my parents are lying about everything, and they can’t pay for shit. I worry that I’m just being set up to fail. I even worry ...” I caught my breath. Saying this all out loud was hard. Trusting a human being was hard. But at least I wasn’t looking into her eyes. At least the darkness of a September tent wrapped us and kept our secrets from everyone else.
“I worry,” I whispered, “that you’ll go away to college in Chicago, and I’ll be stuck in Akawe, and I’ll never get out.”
I heard a deep breath from Omara. I felt her belly raise beneath my cupped palm. She had fallen asleep, and I was grateful.



Urbantasm Book Two
The Empty Room
by Connor Coyne

Publisher: Gothic Funk Press
Date of Publication: September 2019      
Number of pages:
Word Count: 175,000      
Cover Artist: Sam Perkins-Harbin, Forge22 Design

Urbantasm: The Empty Room is the second book in the magical teen noir serial novel inspired by the author’s experiences growing up in and around Flint, Michigan.

John Bridge is only two months into junior high and his previously boring life has already been turned upside-down. His best friend has gone missing, his father has been laid-off from the factory, and John keeps looking over his shoulder for a mysterious adversary: a man with a knife and some perfect blue sunglasses.

As if all this wasn’t bad enough, John must now confront his complicated feelings for a classmate who has helped him out of one scrape after another, although he knows little about who she is and what she wants. What does it mean to want somebody? How can you want them if you don’t understand them? Does anybody understand anyone, ever? These are hard questions made harder in the struggling city of Akawe, where the factories are closing, the schools are closing, the schools are crumbling, and even the streetlights can’t be kept on all night.

John and his friends are only thirteen, but they are fighting for their lives and futures. Will they save Akawe, will they escape, or are they doomed? They might find their answers in an empty room… in a city with ten thousand abandoned houses, there will be plenty to choose from.



Urbantasm Book One
The Dying City
by Connor Coyne
            
Genre: YA, Magical Realism, New Adult, Teen Noir, Lit Fic
Publisher: Gothic Funk Press
Date of Publication: September 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0989920230
ASIN: 0989920232
Number of pages: 450 pages
Word Count: 85,000
Cover Artist: Sam Perkins-Harbin,
Forge22 Design

Book Description:

Urbantasm is a magical teen noir serial novel inspired by the author’s experiences growing up in and around Flint, Michigan.

Thirteen-year-old John Bridge’s plans include hooking up with an eighth-grade girl and becoming one of the most popular kids at Radcliffe Junior High, but when he steals a pair of strange blue sunglasses from a homeless person, it drops him into the middle of a gang war overwhelming the once-great Rust Belt town of Akawe.

John doesn’t understand why the sunglasses are such a big deal, but everything, it seems, is on the table. Perhaps he accidentally offended the Chalks, a white supremacist gang trying to expand across the city. Maybe the feud involves his friend Selby, whose father died under mysterious circumstances. It could even have something to do with O-Sugar, a homegrown drug with the seeming ability to distort space. On the night before school began, a group of teenagers took O-Sugar and leapt to their deaths from an abandoned hospital.

John struggles to untangle these mysteries while adjusting to his new school, even as his parents confront looming unemployment and as his city fractures and burns.

 “A novel of wonder and horror.”— William Shunn, author of The Accidental Terrorist




About the Author:

Connor Coyne is a writer living and working in Flint, Michigan.

His serial novel Urbantasm is winner of numerous awards. Hugo- and Nebula-nominee William Shunn has praised Urbantasm as “a novel of wonder and horror.”
Connor has also authored two other celebrated novels, Hungry Rats and Shattering Glass, as well as Atlas, a collection of short stories.

Connor’s essay “Bathtime” was included in the Picador anthology Voices from the Rust Belt. His work has been published by Vox.comBelt MagazineSanta Clara Review, and elsewhere. 

Connor is Director of Gothic Funk Press.  He has served on the planning committee for the Flint Festival of Writers and represented Flint’s 7th Ward as its artist-in-residence for the National Endowment for the Arts’ Our Town grant. In 2007, he earned his Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the New School.

Connor lives in Flint, Michigan less than a mile from the house where he grew up.

Urbantasm: http://urbantasm.com

Author Website: http://connorcoyne.com

Newsletter Signup: http://eepurl.com/bzZvb5

Blog: http://connorcoyne.com/blog

Twitter: https://twitter.com/connorcoyne

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Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/connorryancoyne

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Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4218298.Connor_Coyne

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Comments

  1. Replies
    1. Thank you! All of my covers are designed by Sam Perkins-Harbin of Forge22.com; he does beautiful work, specializing in steampunk and vaporwave designs.

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