Welcome to another installment of If My Book, the Monkeybicycle feature in which authors compare their recently released books to weird things. This week Kate Brandes writes about Stone Creek, her new novel forthcoming from Wyatt-MacKenzie Publishing.
If Stone Creek were a heavy metal song it would be Ride the Lightning performed live in a dimly lit abandoned warehouse with hundreds of people pushing each other in the mosh pit and feeling part of something bigger.
If Stone Creek were a tropical tree fruit it would be a pink grapefruit, the flesh of which suggests something sweeter than the slightly bitter and nourishing reality.
If Stone Creek were bedrock, it would be metamorphic schist, shaped by intense heat and pressure into shaggy stone with flecks of mica that catch the light and sparkle.
If Stone Creek were an item in lost and found, it would be a handmade necklace of wood carved in the shape of a heart, with a secret compartment that only two people know how to open, the original giver and receiver.
If Stone Creek were a unisex perfume scent, it would be a blend of moss, copper and wild phlox reminiscent of fecund dirt soaked with rain on a warm spring day.
If Stone Creek were a sky, it would be full of deep grey cumulous clouds pierced on the horizon by a low setting sun casting long shadows across vibrant green farm fields dotted with sheep.
If Stone Creek were a cocktail, it would be made by the expert bartender with a handlebar mustache who offers to make you a drink from his imagination and then proceeds to pour from different bottles in rapid succession, before setting an elixir in front of you that going down is complicated, warm, and somewhat undefinable, but the aftertaste of which reminds you of home.
Kate Brandes lives in the small river town of Riegelsville, Pennsylvania, with her family. She writes about rural places and small-town dynamics with underlying environmental themes. Kate has worked as a geologist and environmental scientist for more than twenty years. She currently teaches in the environmental program at Moravian University, where she also co-directs the Moravian Writers’ Conference. Kate’s first novel, The Promise of Pierson Orchard, was published in 2017. Stone Creek, out in August 2024, is her second novel.
