Editor’s Introduction

While reading the ten novel openings featured in this issue of Embark, I found myself thinking about all the settings in which they take place. One of the pleasures of running this journal is the variety of locations that it puts me in contact with, not only because our contributors hail from all over the world but also because the novels they’ve written describe so many different times and places.

Farthest from me geographically (as I write this in Cambridge, Massachusetts) is Tokyo, capital of Japan, the primary setting for SEA OF CLOUDS, by G. S. Arnold. It’s 1923, and we know that a disaster will soon stop the city’s clocks. Yet in these first pages it’s the protagonist who seizes our interest: an American opium addict. As he wanders the vivid, crowded streets in search of his closest friend, a Japanese expert in folklore, he finds himself surrounded by drug-induced hallucinations. It’s a suitably strange and captivating beginning for a story about the aftermath of catastrophic upheaval.

Chronologically speaking, J. Bradford Engelsman carries us the furthest, for his novel, THE PERCIVAL SMITH SCHOOL FOR MAGICAL RESEARCH, opens with a marvelously atmospheric prologue set in prehistoric times, when the look-out for a group of nomads observes an odd, human-like creature pursuing the beast that he himself is stalking for his tribe’s next meal. The first chapter then jumps back to the present, with a jumble of texts from our own time, though the narrator-compiler (who may or may not be human) is speaking from the distant future—giving this unorthodox novel an enormous time-span.

THE PROPHECIES, by Elizabeth Brodbine Ghoniem, takes us to modern-day Cairo in Egypt, where a young woman named Abi, about to begin graduate school in America, is preparing for one last adventure with her friends. A touching scene between Abi and her family members, along with the subsequent night-time hike in which she and her boyfriend affirm their love for each other, leaves us—and Abi—completely unprepared for the terrible nightmare that awaits her on her return home. This shock is an unforgettable way to lock readers into the story, making them eager to join Abi in her long quest for answers.

Noelle Riggott finds a different way to lure readers into deep investment with FINDING THE PLOT, which takes place in Yorkshire, England, during the Covid pandemic: she connects us viscerally to the emotions of her nervous protagonist, Jo. Jo is thrilled to be assigned an allotment in a neighborhood garden—a haven in a time of isolation—but she must conquer her own insecurities in order to engage with the community she finds there. Adding a fascinating layer to the novel is the fact that it’s also a retelling of the Bhagavad Gita—which explains the mythic and seemingly unrelated prologue, set in ancient India.

ENNOR AND THE LEY LINES, by Judith Pratt, is another novel set in England, but not as we know it: this delightful fantasy offers us a magical version of Cornwall in the Victorian era, in which women with special powers must guard “ley lines” in the earth that ensure water and nourishment for humans and animals. Ennor is one of these line-walkers, but she has been pushed off her family’s property by her brother, after he embraces the straitlaced religion of a neighboring country. When he sells the estate, Ennor and her allies must fight the intruders to save their traditional way of life and maintain the well-being of their land.

Marc Simon, in his gripping novel THE LUGER, takes us to Normandy during the brutal days of World War II. Thrust instantly into the action, we join a group of American soldiers as they watch a German plane crash into a nearby field. Sandy Steinberg, the novel’s protagonist, recoils at the confrontation between his sergeant and the wounded Nazi pilot. But when his own interference leads to the sergeant’s death, Steinberg kills the pilot and then devises a false narrative, making himself a hero—and, for the reader, demonstrating the terrible competing pressures of fear, compassion, loyalty, and war.

Traveling south, we come to Rome, the setting for Karen Pinkus’s evocative novel NUDA PROPRIETÀ. This Italian phrase refers to an oddity in the country’s real-estate laws, by which someone can buy a property while its previous owner retains the legal right to live there. The novel’s protagonist—an unmarried woman living with her demanding father and desperate for a place of her own—has to rely on the grisly hope that the elderly tenant of the apartment she’s just purchased will die sooner rather than later. Meanwhile, Pinkus deftly showcases the daydreams and eccentricities of a lonely person forced to wait.

The remaining openings, though they all take place in the United States, are widely disparate in their more specific settings. GLASS MOTHER, by M. Anne Avera, opens in a women’s prison in Alabama. With enthralling immediacy, Avera puts us into the mind of a woman who has just finished her sentence and is now waiting, with equal excitement and apprehension, for her husband to pick her up. Troubled by memories of her crime, her fractured family relationships, and her ongoing anxieties, she eventually lands a job at a big-box store. Her first meeting with the manager reveals both her wry insight and her overwhelming fears.

DEFINITELY DEAD, by Christa Charrette, also features a woman plagued by fear, but in this riveting novel—after a prologue describing an ominous funeral— the setting is a shiny, futuristic apartment complex in Miami that speaks of limitless wealth. After a harried flight, the recently wed protagonist joins her rich husband in what should be their dream home, only to come up against a series of closed doors that shut her out from the various alarming elements of his world. His sleek lifestyle, like the pair of sunglasses he gives to her, provides no hint of what lies behind it, and as readers we share her mounting dread.

In HEX SIGNS, Elizabeth Amon skillfully paints another portrait of domestic unease—in this case located in rural Pennsylvania—where Clara, a loving wife and devoted mother, balances the stressful, opposing demands of raising her children in a run-down house and managing a newspaper in the nearest city. On top of these responsibilities, she must care for her erratic sister, who is staying with them and throws their family life off-balance. Offering both the urgency of a thriller and the resonant details of a character drama, Amon lures us into Clara’s crowded life, where even the most mundane events seem cast in an eerie light.

In these ten novel openings, we find surprise and excitement, joy and anxiety, playing out all over the world. In every one, the emotions sparked by the first pages give the promise of an immersive story to come. I hope you enjoy them all as much as I did!

— Ursula DeYoung

Table of Contents

HEX SIGNS – Elizabeth Amon
SEA OF CLOUDS – G. S. Arnold
GLASS MOTHER – M. Anne Avera
DEFINITELY DEAD – Christa Charrette
THE PERCIVAL SMITH SCHOOL FOR MAGICAL RESEARCH – J. Bradford Engelsman
THE PROPHECIES – Elizabeth Brodbine Ghoniem
NUDA PROPRIETÀ – Karen Pinkus
ENNOR AND THE LEY LINES – Judith Pratt
FINDING THE PLOT – Noelle Riggott
THE LUGER – Marc Simon