Inside Glimpse to At the End of the Day by Meg Whitlock
My next book is not, as you would expect, the sequel to The
Dark Man’s Son. I’m working on that, too, but it’ll be a while before it’s
done. My current big project is a novella tentatively titled At the End of the Day. It takes place in
the same universe as Dark Man, but it’s sort of . . . a prequel. It’s confusing
when your book takes place in as many eras as Dark Man!
The main character is Jameson O’Connor, Jason’s grandfather,
and it tells the story of how he and Alex (or Claire, as he knows her) met and
how Jameson became a Hunter. Jason has tons of questions about Jameson, and
Alex manages to skim over most of them. You also might remember in the first
flashback chapter, Jameson is upset because he just killed a girl named
Elsbeth. He thinks, “He had planned to ask her to marry him. Instead she’d
betrayed them all, and he’d killed her.”
At the End of the Day
tells Jameson and Elsbeth’s story. Who is she? Obviously not Jason’s
grandmother. How did she betray them? How did Jameson kill her? Why?! Lucatz is
a character, and of course Alex and Cassius. It’s much more about Jameson than
the Guardians, though, and we don’t see as much of them as in Dark Man.
The novella opens in Ireland the year James turns 14. He
meets a mysterious woman on the cliffs near his village. She gives him a
book—nothing mystical, an ordinary book—and promises to meet him again one year
from that day. Over the course of that year the village suffers a terrible run
of bad luck. When Jameson meets the woman again, she tells him the bad luck is
because of him: dark forces are coming after him, and the only way to keep his
family safe is to leave home forever.
The action jumps forward a few years, and we see Jameson at
school, the same school that’s burning down in Chapter 2 of Dark Man. It’s just
before the second World War, and tensions are high all over. I don’t want to
give away much more of the plot, but it obviously ends with betrayal and the
school on fire!
I’m hoping to have it done before the summer’s over, and I’m
planning for a Fall release.
About the Author: Meg Whitlock has been writing nearly all her life, and she’s glad she finally got over her laziness and wrote the book she’s been dreaming about for years. She graduated from Queens University of Charlotte with a BA in Comparative Arts with an Art History specialization and an Ancient History minor…which is a mouthful no matter how you say it. She has four cats (including an invisible one), a car named Babar, and a vivid imagination.
In 2001 her one-act play, “The Shoebox,” was produced by Catawba College in Salisbury, NC and presented at the American College Theatre Festival. She was honored by Art:21 and the Mint Museum of Art for her essay "Kara Walker: Using Stereotypes to Provoke Thought," and she's won awards for both her fiction and non-fiction writing.
Where to Find the Author
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