David Nessio faced plenty of danger in Syria, doing rescue archaeology in the midst of a civil war. Back in Washington, DC he thinks he is safe and can get back to his graduate studies. But a phone call from a stranger leads him to the scene of a murder, and from there he descends back into violence and peril. Something his team found in Syria is so valuable, or so dangerous, that people would kill for it. As Nessio tries to figure out why, he keeps being pointed back to the period of history called the Bronze Age Collapse. Prayers from that time, around 1200 BC, lament that humans have lost contact with the gods and their messengers. Nessio learns that there is an idea, passed around among believers in secret, that we used to know how to reach the gods whenever we wanted. People call this knowledge the Key. Nessio discovers that while many believers are desperately seeking the Key, so they can bring divine power back into the world, others are equally determined to stop them. Nessio can’t believe in any of this, but since people on both sides are certain he knows something important, perhaps even the Key itself, he is drawn into their shadowy conflict. He travels across the US, then to Germany, and finally back to Syria, where Key believers try to open a door to other worlds in the ruins of an ancient temple, and sinister powers move to stop them.
And this is my explanation of how it came about:
I’ve always been a fan of stories based around ancient secrets, preserved by old and powerful institutions. But I am usually disappointed by the secrets themselves. Treasure maps? Stories about Jesus’ children? Really? That’s all you’ve got? A few years ago I was reading an old book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes. Jaynes was a psychologist who believed that most people used to be schizophrenic, or something like it. They regularly heard voices in their heads, and they believed they were hearing the voices of gods or angels. Sometime around 1200 BC there was a change in human consciousness and most of us stopped hearing those voices. Cut off from their gods people made desperate, lonely prayers, many of which survive. I thought, what if people once had sacred knowledge that allowed them to speak with divine beings, but somehow that knowledge was lost or hidden? That would be a secret worth keeping. So I set out to write a thriller based around this premise. I called this secret the Key, and imagined a world built around it. Who would want to keep the Key secret, and who would want to bring it out? Where would people look for information about it, and how would they share it? I made my main character an archaeologist, like me, only a lot more daring and interesting. I imagined that in Syria, during the civil war, his team had discovered something people believe is related to the Key, or perhaps the Key itself, and that as this rumor spreads a circle of violence closes around everyone who had been part of that excavation. It would end, I knew, with spectacular explosions.
That last sentence is a good indication of how my stories develop. I start with a few ideas and images – a dig in the desert, a chase through Washington, an aristocrat in a limousine, an explosion – which slowly grow as I write. I never have a clear idea of the whole plot when I start. That mens a lot of rewriting, as the story evolves, but it is the only way I have been able to do it.
So, here it is. Paperback is for sale here. Kindle should be up in 24 hours.
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