Purgatory

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Currently awaiting placement.

148,000 words

Purgatory

At A Glance

Her name is Salia. She's a preacher of the Word, a prophetess of doom, and a dangerously talented sorceress with a very big secret: she knows who unleashed the Tar Baby bacterium that suddenly destroyed all the world's oil in 2017, and why they did it. Now, twenty years later, after the wars have ended and the remaining pockets of civilization have learned to make do with lesser forms of energy, she's ready to bring back the oil—to power a new theocracy.

But there's a problem. The final key to her sinister scheme lies hidden in the isolated mountain town of Purgatory, Colorado. And the outlaw Salia is not welcome there.

Quantum physicist Jack Vara is also headed for Purgatory, to take over the estate of his recently deceased father, Carlos Herrera. What Jack doesn't know is that Carlos chose to die by his own hand rather than reveal to Salia the location of the COTO protocol she needs to carry out her plans. And now the only remaining clue lies buried deep in the mind of a man with a damaged brain.

Salia's quest gains urgency when, against all expectations, Silas Teague awakens from a semi-vegetative state and disappears into the night before Salia can scour his newly mended mind. And no one, not even his gifted twin sister, Jennifer, knows where he's headed.

Will the oil ever flow again? Should it? These questions are decided by a preternatural melding of science and sorcery when Silas returns from the ruins of Old Denver with protocol in hand. There he find himself side by side with Jack, Jennifer and a handful of Carlos Herrera partisans in a standoff against Salia and her minions in one of the most dangerous and peculiar places on earth.

Why I Wrote Purgatory

I came upon the idea for Purgatory after asking a simple question: what would happen if all the world's oilfields suddenly became unworkable? It seemed only logical that civilization would quickly tear itself apart as a result of starvation and civil war on a global scale.

At some point a stasis would be reached, although survival in the new world would depend upon constant vigilance; alliances would have to be made, nurtured and continually reappraised with utmost care. This is the world of Purgatory: twenty years after 'the Turning,' the watershed moment when everyone realized the oil was gone forever.

Still, a book about a pack of war-scarred survivors eking out a hardscrabble existence in a diminished world would be both pointless and uninteresting, and it's already been done too many times. I needed a rich and strangely appealing setting (which I 'found' in the imaginary mountain town of Purgatory, Colorado), and a plot that would threaten it right down to its tenuous foundations. So I asked another question: what if there were a body of knowledge so profound that it would permit the bearer to exercise unquestioned dominion over the new post-Turning world?

All the book needed at that point was a unique group of flesh-and-blood characters willing to take the plot and run with it to the end. And a worthy antagonist. After a few false starts, Salia Warchez, a ruthless sorceress with a lust for power, emerged as the engine driving the plot. With my raven-haired witch in place, everything else followed naturally.

The strange science described in Purgatory is real, insofar as it is openly discussed in the physics community. And that makes the sorcery extrapolated from that science—whether real or not—at least explainable in scientific terms.

— Rex A. Ewing