Last week, I shared my early review of David, the final installment in The Unseen trilogy by Johnny Worthen, which will be released at long last on August 16th!
This week, I get to welcome Johnny Worthen himself back to my blog to celebrate! As a fellow author of series fiction, and having yet to see publication of a final installment myself, I knew exactly the question I had to ask today...
How does it feel to be finishing The Unseen series and saying goodbye to the characters?
Releasing books is always an emotional event. One of my coping mechanisms has always been (not surprisingly) to write about it. I’ll be posting “Letting Go of David” on my blog when it gets closer and I feel the full emotional impact. Probably next week or the one after. It’s coming. I can feel it building up.
Until that critical mass outburst, I can at least say that this book does indeed feel different from my others. I wrote the Unseen trilogy many moons ago. I had the entire series written before the first book, Eleanor, hit the shelves back in 2014, so the process of creating the series is now dim and colored by its success. It’s been a part of my life for a long time now, my claim to fame, my best-seller, my most talked about. Those are the feelings that are beginning to bubble up, but in the meantime, I have to say that reading the series again as I have, I feel the ending of the series as a fan would.
Just outside my control, beyond my recollection of creation, I read these characters as old friends and rejoice in their triumphs and mourn their defeats.
Change. It’s all about change. The theme of the series. The painful but necessary evolution of character and idea and lives. Survival at cost, affection at debt. Experiencing the end of the arc carries me through the gambit of emotions as I hope it will others.
Eleanor’s adventures in David are different from the previous books’. A necessary adaptation, as is only proper. Eleanor’s changed. The world has changed. The hated are loved, the loved have betrayed.
It is a bitter-sweet ending. A culmination of the promises made throughout and the direct descendant of first chapter of the first book. The rise, fall, and rise of a broken, flawed, suffering girl, inhuman, lonely and lost.
This series always stirs me, has been known to bring me to tears. David is no different. Having an ending now only sharpens the edge. But it’s all good. An ending is change and change is inevitable. And if Eleanor has taught me nothing else, it’s that change though painful and terrible, can be noble.
About David:
"You and no other."Flames and blood – the story of Eleanor's existence.
How can she recover? How can she go on? How can she stay away?
Eleanor survives, it what she does. But at what cost? She learns her past and sees the terrible and tragic history of her kind, the wreckage of fear and necessity spread across generations of innocent lives. It is enough to show her she is toxic, a cause of pain and destruction. For everyone’s own good, she will disappear forever.
But first, one last visit to Jamesford.
The sleepy Wyoming town mourns their lost child. The unremarkable girl who in life wanted only to be ignored is a celebrity in death, a tourist attraction, a legend. A mystery.
But not everyone thinks she’s dead. While some wait in hope for her return, others wait in ambush.
About Johnny Worthen
“I write what I like to read,” says Johnny. “That guarantees me at least one fan.”
Johnny Worthen is an award-winning, best-selling author, voyager, and damn fine human being! He is the tie-dye wearing writer of the nationally acclaimed, #1 Kindle best-selling Eleanor, The Unseen. Among his other excellent and very read-worthy titles are the adult occult thriller Beatrysel, the award-winning mystery The Brand Demand, and the genre bending comedy-noir The Finger Trap. And of course the continuation of The Unseen Trilogy, with Celeste and David.
Trained in stand-up comedy, modern literary criticism and cultural studies, Johnny is a frequent public speaker, teacher and blogger. He’s an instructor at the University of Utah and an acquisitions editor for Omnium Gatherum, a publisher of unique dark fantasy, weird fiction and horror.
You can find him on his homepage, on Facebook, on Twitter, and on Goodreads.
