Welcome to another installment of If My Book, the Monkeybicycle feature in which authors shed light on their recently released books by comparing them to weird things. This week Lee Matthew Goldberg writes about The Ancestor, his novel out now from All Due Respect.
If The Ancestor were a snowman, it would be one of those snowmen a kid makes where it starts off looking pretty good and solid, very Frosty-the-Snowman-esque, but then as the sun begins to set, its coal eyes appear menacing, the carrot nose seems deformed, the pennies used for a mouth are rusted and gnarly, and the top hat has a hole in it, morphing the snowman into someone who might shank you on a dark road.
If The Ancestor were an igloo, it would be an igloo in the Alaskan summer that slowly melts as the days pass, until you’re not entirely sure it was there in the first place. You remember building that igloo, there are blisters on your fingers because the gloves you used were cheap, and you sat in that igloo once when you finished, but now there’s just a soupy mixture of ice and dirt, and you’ve caught a bad cold.
If The Ancestor were an animal, it would be a wolf. A wolf with ice blue eyes that watches you, waiting to attack. It’s lulled you into a false sense of security, almost cute enough to pet because it resembles a husky you had as a child and called Bear, but Bear never bared his teeth in the way that this wolf has, and its teeth are dashed with blood, which tells you that while the wolf has recently feasted, it is far from being quenched.
Lee Matthew Goldberg is the author of the novels The Ancestor, Slow Down, The Mentor from St. Martin’s Press, and The Desire Card. He has been published in multiple languages and nominated for the 2018 Prix du Polar. His first Sci-fi novel ORANGE CITY will be published in 2021. He is the editor-in-chief and co-founder of Fringe, dedicated to publishing fiction that’s outside-of-the-box. Find out more at leematthewgoldberg.com or follow him on Twitter at @leematthewg.
