Author Sarah Beth Durst joins SciFiChick.com today to talk about her latest release THE LOST!
Can you tell us a bit about THE LOST in your own words?
THE LOST is about a woman who gets into her car one day to go to work but instead of turning left at the light, drives straight. And drives and drives until she runs out of a gas in a town full of only lost things and lost people. It’s surrounded by an impenetrable dust cloud, and to get out, she needs the help of a mysterious man called the Finder and a knife-wielding six-year-old girl.
This is your first published novel for adults, instead of YA. Do you feel that your writing style changed at all for this novel?
I feel like my style changes for each novel, depending on what the story needs. THE LOST is magical realism, and the story is told in first person present tense in order to create a disorienting feeling. I love playing with language, and I got to do that a lot in this novel.
One of the things that I love about fantasy is how much variety there is within the genre. You can play with being mythic or funny or silly or profound or whatever and still hold true the core sense of wonder.
Where and what is the town of Lost? Who lives here?
Sometimes, when someone is lost, they wander out of the real world and into nothingness, a vast dust cloud known as the void. If they’re lucky, a Finder finds them in the void and brings them to one of the lost places, such as Lost. They’re stuck there until they find what they lost, and the Missing Man sends them home.
This means the inhabitants of Lost are not… stable. Some have lost their way. Some have lost their dreams or their memories or their minds.
Some have even lost their lives. You see, even death isn’t an escape from Lost.
Who is Lauren Chase?
Lauren is a twenty-seven-year-old woman whose life feels empty. She gave up her dreams, her friends, her planned future, in order to work a dead-end job and take care of her sick mother, who is also her closest friend. But now she’s terrified that her mother may be dying, and rather than face the truth, she runs. She plans to return only a few hours later… but then she can’t.
It looks like THE LOST is just first in a series. How many books do you have planned?
THE LOST will be a trilogy. The second book, THE MISSING, will be coming out in December, followed by THE FOUND in April.
What else are you working on?
CHASING POWER, my next YA book, will be out in October from Bloomsbury. It’s an Indiana Jones kind of adventure about a girl with telekinesis and a boy who can teleport — and who lies as easily as he travels.
Thanks for your time!
Thanks so much for interviewing me!