Real Places -

Post date: Dec 07, 2010 6:51:27 PM

                I was born in Montclair, New Jersey. It was a beautiful town in Northern New Jersey. It was green, but had places to go, shops, movies. It was only about an hour from the city. I loved my home town. When people make fun of New Jersey, they're talking about the south. They're talking about the airport. I promise you, no one who knows what they're talking about makes fun of Montclair.

Despite my opinion, my family moved to upstate New York when I was 15. We lived in rural Sullivan County for the rest of the time I was in high school. I made some good friends there, some of which are still in my life today, but it was a traumatic change for me that in many ways I have never completely gotten over.

My new novel Luminous and Ominous is actually set in Sullivan County. It’s a strange place to put a science fiction story, but it’s a place that I know well and that’s why I chose it.

When you read the book, understand that Monticello, Woodbourne, Liberty, and Middletown are all real places. Everywhere the survivors go is a fictionalized version of a real location. Every store mentioned in the novel really exists and it is where I say it is.

The journey that my survivors attempt to take from Monticello to Liberty is one that I have driven many hundreds of times.

Monticello is filled with old abandoned hotels, from better and more affluent times, and in the summer Hassidic Jewish youth camps. I did my best to realistically if briefly portray the people who lived there and the strange relationship that exists between the Jewish and gentile populations. It’s not the point of my novel. Luminous and Ominous is about an alien ecology that invades the Earth and threatens to take the place of all life you’ll find here currently.

It was important to me to balance the fantastic elements of the story with real-world and concrete places. I could take you to the diner in Liberty where the survivors meet up before going underground. We could go to the bookstore in Middletown. You could drive to Woodbourne and wait in your car outside of the kosher pizzeria for me to call you. As you drive up route 17, maybe you can figure out which gas station the survivors stayed in?

I don’t intend to editorialize upon the people or the places in any way, but I have used them in my book to ground the story.

I hope that it makes it all seem more real.

Now go and read my book!

Luminous and Ominous