If you looked outside your window tonight, would you see a dragon’s shadow? 

A young boy lives with his stony, aging father in a cabin up on the forest mountainside. He has been taught to survive, and that is all; things like dreams and words and mothers have all been lost in this way of life. One night, gathering firewood, he finds a dying griffin in the woods – a creature straight from the storybooks. A thing that is not meant to exist. It is these things that his father has always scorned and detested, these daydreams he has always insisted would destroy his son. And so, when his father declares that the world is soon to end before dying in his chair by the fire, the boy decides that he must leave the cabin. He uncovers the old teachings of his mother and her guide to the fae of the woods. He decides he will find the dragon causing the end of the world, and slay it – just like he thinks his father would have wanted. Just like the metal men in the stories.

This novel, The Mountains, is an amalgamation of my work in fantasy and my belief that the genre’s true power comes from its grounding in human emotion and experience. Its fictional realm draws inspiration from European fantasy, German fairy tales, and the world and culture of Bhutan. I see my own journey in that of my unlikely hero; the shaky departure from your only home, the slow discovery that your wise parents were not, perhaps, always right. This novel is also in many ways the purest expression of who I am as an artist; I am not limited by reality, because I do not see it in the same way the rest of the world does. I play with its boundaries like a cat in the shadows. I believe there is a distortion beneath what we call the quotidian, stories in faded crosswalks, a rich darkness in the dusk of passing streetlamps. I see dragons in subway maps, a haunting in the eyes of strangers, a muse in the haunted. I believe, to put it simply, in belief. I would hope that my readers, through the story of this boy, will find themselves believing too.