New Release Overmorrow by Lancelot Schaubert #EpicFantasy #ComingofAge

Title Of Book: Overmorrow
By: Lancelot Schaubert
Genre: Fantasy
Sub-Genre: YA, Portal

Blurb:

According to Ellie, the middle child of two overseas ambassadors, a magical monster named Oblivion kidnapped her elder brother. She believes Oblivion wants to use her brother as a backup memory, a backup hard drive.

She encounters Overmorrow – a magical rain that wakes up normal New Yorkers unto the wonder all around them.

Once she receives Overmorrow and its “seer’s sight,” she discovers someone has stolen the source of the rain.

Convinced Oblivion has also stolen the rains, she decides to use the mystery of Overmorrow to lead her back to her elder brother and save his mind from Oblivion. As Ellie fails over and over again, it becomes terribly apparent to her that this rain thief wants to obliviate monsters from the memories of New Yorkers and everyone else in the megacosm.

And if we forget the monsters, they’re free to eat us all.

Excerpt:

Ellie’s mother showed the worst of her memory loss where most stories, days, and many lifetimes end: during a bedtime story. The bedtime story was going very, very poorly.
Charlie, Ellie’s oldest brother, had long fallen asleep in his own room. He’d probably read himself to sleep with a memory puzzle mystery. In Ellie’s room, her two younger siblings — Annie and Levi — had drifted off in their own bunks after her mom’s first round of stories. It was dark. Only the sequins, stickers, and costumes caught twinkles of refracted light to match the stars outside. That twinkling dark left Ellie and her mother to share a long look only they could share by the glow of Ellie’s yellow lamplight.
Ellie’s wide eyes had a special case of heterochromia iridium. Two different colors in each eye. One eye was as green as wet grass, one eye was as turquoise as the Turkish ocean. She had inherited that exact trait and those exact colors from her mother’s eyes. And so when mom’s eyes met Ellie’s across her yellow lamplight glow, it was green meets turquoise, turquoise meets green. “Mom?”
“Sorry honey, what was it?”
Ellie feared her mother had blanked out again like she kept doing lately. Then she hoped her mother’s mind was off in her own little world again. “You were telling the story about the pilgrim baby, momma. Did he have a black suit and one of those gold buckled hats?”
“Oh Ellie, he wasn’t a puritan. Not that kind of pilgrim. They didn’t even have those kinds of image breakers where this baby came from. No protestants. No, not that kind of pilgrim.”
“What kind? You stopped telling me his story.”
“History not… not… his story? Odd. Oh. Yes, right, the baby could travel.”
“By himself?” Ellie asked.
Mom cocked her head at Ellie’s phrasing, but nodded.
“Babies can only crawl, Mom. If they’ve learned how, I mean.”
“Not like that, Ellie. This baby could jump from world to world.”
“Jump?” Ellie asked.
“Not with its legs.”
“Then how?”
“Something about a crib. Or maybe the baby’s house? Could he househop? Cribcrawl? Roomroam? I don’t remember how it goes, the right word for it. Something about thinking about his home? I’m sorry.” Mom looked ashamed. Then lost. “I don’t remember.”
Ellie’s breathing quickened, then caught up high. “You don’t remember the story or his power?”
“Both.”
Ellie sighed, frustrated. Mom’s memory kept getting worse. “The baby was a globetrotter?”
“Sure,” Mom said.
“A baby Harlem Globetrotter. Could the baby shoot hoops?”
“No,” Mom said and she shifted her angle on her propped arm. “Not like that. It could travel. It had seen many worlds for a baby.”
“What happened to him on his travels?”
“Some worlds don’t like to be discovered. Some worlds hide. And the baby had found them out. So people from the hidden world came to snatch it away.”
“Did the baby fight them?”
“In its own way,” she said, then swallowed. “It was a baby emissary. So it had ways of hiding even from them, ways of getting the truth out.”
“Like us?”
Mom nodded, her eyes drifted towards the window, towards the stars.
“Mom, what are we emissaries from? Emissaries always come from somewhere. They said in government class and social studies that ambassadors are from other countries. Are we from another country?”
Her mom turned her eyes back first to Ellie’s wall and all of their travel photos, then to the drawings Ellie had made outside of school. After that she slowly turned, almost horrified. She froze that way for a moment, then searched, deeply, into Ellie’s eyes. “Of… a kind.”
“Why did you tell Dad that we were hiding under protection? Are we in witness protection?”
Mom laughed a dark laugh. “Who told you about witness protection?”
“Movies. Podcasts.”
Mom said nothing, but there was a naked honesty in her eyes and she searched her daughter further, pursing lips as if desperate to tell.
“Mom?”
“Yeah?”
“Are you okay?” Ellie asked.
Her mother locked color-complementary eyes with her once more. Then she looked up at the other bunk at Annie. Down and over at Levi. Was she making sure they were still asleep? Then she turned back to Ellie. “No.”
Ellie’s breath caught high in her chest. “How can I help you, Mom? I can help. Are we gonna be okay?”
“You will be more okay than I will be.”
“What about the others?”
Her mother shrugged, almost despairing with the shadows in those beautiful bicolored eyes.
Seeing her mother in that state crimped Ellie’s heart, seized it, as if some great bedrock had cracked beneath her and the world itself were hanging onto her arteries for dear life. “Does Charlie know?”
“No.”
Mom did this sometimes, sharing things with Ellie that no one else in the family knew. Ellie wondered if it was because they looked so similar.
“Dad?”
“He knows. He’s a good man.”
“What’s wrong?” Ellie asked.
“Big things keep going blank in my head. Like your sister today.”
“What’s her name?” Ellie asked for the second time that day without thinking.
Biting her lip, Mom winced.
Ellie sat up in bed. “And my brother?”
Mom shook her head, almost desperate.
“Mom, what can we do? How can I help?”
“I wish I could travel like that baby did. Travel again.”
“Again? Again? What do you mean again? Like the way we went to Paris?”
Her mother looked out the window one more time, searching the skies. Searching. She turned back to Ellie and said, “Just sleep and dream of babies going on adventures, Mrs. Wright.”
“Mom?”
“Yes?”
“I’m not married.”
“Right, Ellie, right. Of course you’re not married.” She kissed her daughter’s forehead. Nibbled a piece of her hair oddly. “Dream and sleep of babies.”
Ellie desperately searched for a mathematical truth or a fact of rote memorization that might hide deep within her mother’s mind. Something, anything she could use to shake her mother free, wake her mother up. Why not two plus two or one minus one? But she, having just learned about exponential power in math, impulsively asked instead, “What’s zero to the power of zero?”
Mrs. Wright waited a long, long time and then answered, “One.”
That basic forgetfulness crushed Ellie: of course the answer was zero. How could her mother answer so wrongly?
“Goodnight,” Mom said and kissed her forehead and both eyelids, the way she did so often.
Ellie tried to lay down and sleep, but her mind reeled from that answer: One. Had her mother forgotten the number zero too? Looking down, she realized she’d been picking at the cuticles on her nails, tearing at her own flesh. She didn’t want to tear herself in half, but she sometimes her journey left her with no other choice, having the mind she had. So she tore at her nails.
Minutes later, judging by the clear rustling, her mother had gone to bed quickly. Across the hall, Ellie’s mother snored. In response to that snoring, that apathy, Ellie sat bolt upright in her squishy bed, wrapped in the softest pink down blanket. Her quicksilver hair whipped around her. She would have been an aloof, dark-haired girl were it not for the hair that matched her mother’s.
She was an aloof girl, it’s only that rather than being dark, her hair caught the true essence of shadows when the light hit it. Her hair caught darkness. If you’ve ever looked into a dish of mercury, you know true liquid mirrors reflect the shadows of a room as much as the light. Her hair did that.
It was odd hair.
As she stared at the picture of her mother she’d washi-taped to her wall, she touched her mother’s picture with her left hand’s callused fingertips, the only rough thing on her.
Ellie was afraid for her mother’s fading memory. The whole month, mom kept saying she should be remembering something. Something important. Something nefarious about their post in Missouri. What had Mom forgotten?
Why couldn’t she even remember a basic bedtime story? Or, frankly, just finish the dadgomn thing by making up an ending?
But mom’s memory loss didn’t explain all of Ellie’s fear. The night before, Ellie’d had a terrible dream, one she’d woken from screaming. Her screams had woken the whole house. Now she feared drifting off again and seeing him. Death, the Grim Reaper, maybe it was Father Time eating his children? She’d dreamed a psychopomp had ferried her across some great threshold of grief while she watched — let — her brother die. Something was wrong. She panted like a winded dog when it leaves off chasing a fox because it worries a bear has caught its scent. She looked over at the beds of her siblings, angry that they hadn’t woken to help fend off whatever was coming.
Why did the base of her neck crawl as if something had caught her scent? And the scent of her siblings?
Had something for real?
It would have been far, far better for her had it been a bear that had caught her scent.
Outside her room, firecrackers. A young girl cried. Loud romance. Flying planes. A churning of earth. Inside her room, those sounds increased Ellie’s fear for her mother’s memory and for her own sanity. But mostly, the sounds grew her terror that something mighty and big approached. She clutched her pink fluffy comforter to her chattering teeth, hoping to silence them for her sister’s sleep. As frustrated as she was that neither was awake to help her calm her fears, she also felt a kind of sadness for the moment that they would have to wake up. Let her siblings sleep as long as they could.
Instead her anger moved back towards her mother.
Because none of these loud night sounds awakened Mrs. Wright.
As she looked out into the yard, a horse continued watching the windows of Mrs. Wright and of Ellie. A horse?

What People Are Saying:

5 Stars – “YA portal fantasy featuring three children investigating the mysterious disappearance of their brother and some sort of magical theft of memories.”

5 Stars – “Set in New York City (‘the birthplace of American argument’), there’s a girl. A young girl, who speaks ‘narrative rather fluently’, sets off on a crime-solving adventure driven by questionable circumstances in her family. Instigated by the appearance of Overmorrow in her life…”

5 Stars – “To me, this had the fantasy-yet-urban feel of ‘Wrinkle in Time’ and had some elements of ‘Narnia’. The comfy-cozy message for kids that things can work out and that they *do* have some control over their lives.”

5 Stars – “Lancelot Schaubert is an entertaining and intelligent writer with a flair for world-building. His work is full of good surprises.”

5 Stars – “Schaubert is a powerful fantasist, a multi-layered thinker and a pure craftsperson with words. This is a writer who will make waves, break boundaries and be heard.”

Meet Lancelot Schaubert:

I don’t live in Little Egypt anymore, I’ve been a New Yorker for a decade. But in New York, everyone’s from somewhere else… Speaking of Little Egypt, I am the author of the novel Bell Hammers, which Publisher’s Weekly called “a hoot.” That sounds suspiciously as if they’re secretly run by owls. I’ve sold dozens of stories, hundreds of poems and essays to outlets as varied as McSweeney’s, The New Haven Review (Yale’s Institute Library), Shondaland (Shonda Rhimes’s publication), The World Series Edition of Poker Pro, TOR.com, Riddlebird, and I’m pretty proud of selling pieces to both Nonbinary Review and The Anglican Theological Review in the same morning. In that capacity, I am a full voting member of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association. I edit The Showbear Family Circus (which, in its heyday, published over 500 works from 400+ renowned academics, artists, and authors) as well as the anthology series Of Gods and Globes, compose and performs songs from my albums H.A.L.T.S. and All Who Wander, deliver keynote speeches, narrate audiobooks, produce various short films and theatrical productions and graphic novels. The latter I reinvented with Mark Neuenschwander through photonovels like Cold Brewed, which won the oldest photography competition in the world PhotoSpiva, judged that year by a representative from the Chicago Museum of Photography. The Missouri Tourism Board commissioned our second photonovel The Joplin Undercurrent that year.