Ryan Finch

Whence, Simulacrum? Ryan Finch

Erin is very not okay. And it's been this way for a long time. She is depressed. She is numb. She is exhausted down to her bones. She is a misanthrope and has bitterly retreated from the world, becoming a hermit in her small high-rise apartment. But, one day, a ray of light seems to enter her life at last: she falls madly in love with a mysterious stranger... in a dream. This jolts her like a shotgun-blast of sugary hope right to the face, banishing the doldrums and bleak meaninglessness she had been wrestling with before. It is the answer to a question she didn't even realize she was asking.

Entranced by the siren song of these dreamworld trysts, she seeks them out each and every time she falls asleep. They provide a wellspring of impossible happiness which makes her feel whole again. And this soon transforms her life. It gives her a quest to pour herself into. For love can be a sublime thing and it can be a deranging force and it can also be both. She becomes desperately obsessed with her dreamt-up paramour and will try anything - no matter how difficult or esoteric or even dangerous - to unite the two of them permanently.

Fate has gifted her an existential skeleton-key, the likes of which no-one should have or even wish to have. Behind some doors is bliss; behind other doors is... something else, something darker. There are abyssal strangenesses into which one can plummet forever and ever, if one is not exceedingly careful.

But Erin has no time for caution. No time for it at all.

Whatever it takes! She will be with her beloved!

You can find out more about the novel at: whencesimulacrum.com