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The Protagonist Speaks

Interviews with the characters of your favourite books

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November 2021

Sam Melvin (of Zombie Detective, by Andy Zach)

Dear readers, tonight we feature an ex-reporter specialising in zombie turkeys. After being fired from the newspaper, he decided to give being a detective a try — but found that people are only interested in hiring him for his experience in dealing with zombie animals

Tell us a little about where you grew up. What was it like there?

This’ll be short, since Midley, Illinois is a very small town (510) and there’s not much to it. I grew up on a farm, but I went to town several times a week with my parents and then every day when I started school. There’s only one street, one high school (300 students), one junior high, and one elementary school. We also have a hamburger stand, a gas station, and a post office.

People are basically the salt of the earth, in the sense they talk about fertilizer and farms and corn and bean prices.

It wasn’t bad at all. I got to drive my dad’s tractor by the time I was ten, and the grain truck by the time I was fourteen. We had a creek and swamp to play in and I could ride my bike to my school friends.

Did you have any favourite toys as a child? Any cherished memories?

I loved playing with my trucks and cars in the sandbox. I played a little pickup baseball and football, but I was never any good. But I was always picked for the teams by my friends, so I had fun anyway.

I remember going to the big town of Peoria for special dinners with my family, like my parents’ anniversary. I got to see the Caterpillar Power Parade and the Heart of Illinois Fair.

What do you do now?

Until yesterday, I was a reporter for the Midley Beacon specializing in tracking and reporting on zombie turkeys. They’ve pretty much died out, that is, they’ve been ground up for sausage or whatever. They don’t really die without a LOT of encouragement.

This morning I was fired by my wife, Lisa Melvin, who’s the editor of the paper. She said the paper isn’t making enough to pay me. I’m worth more drawing unemployment. I’m going to give private investigation a try now. I’m good at asking questions and getting to the bottom of things. Lisa said she’d make it all legal, somehow.

What can you tell us about your latest adventure?

After chasing zombie turkeys, even investigating murders will seem tame. But my first case is from a dairy farmer whose cows keep escaping. He thinks some zombie animal is involved. Could be. I’ll find out. Can’t be any more dangerous than zombie turkeys, can it?

Continue reading “Sam Melvin (of Zombie Detective, by Andy Zach)” →
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Tallis Steelyard (of A Fear of Heights, by Jim Webster)

Dear readers, tonight with us is a poet, a man of inconsistent careers and a somewhat vagrant lifestyle. He’s here to tell us about his latest adventure, involving the Idiosyncratic Diaconate, night soil carts, Partannese bandit chieftains, a stylite, a large dog and some over-spiced food.

Tell us a little about where you grew up. What was it like there?

I’m Tallis Steelyard, Port Naain’s finest living poet. I live and practice my art in Port Naain, the greatest city on the world of Domisa, home of all that is fine and lovely. From time to time I may venture out of the city, both allow those less fortunate than our citizens to enjoy the benefit of high culture, but mainly to avoid my creditors or those who seem to think I have insulted them.

Did you have any favourite toys as a child? Any cherished memories?

I am an only child, but I spent much of my childhood on the streets of Port Naain. This is where I think I sharpened my skills of observation and got to know so many people whose careers I have since chronicled.

What do you do now?

As a poet obviously I have very few formal duties. It is merely enough that I remain within the city as an ornament and thing of wonder. Still a chap has to eat and white wine does not buy itself. Thus and so, I have any number of patrons who rely upon me to raise their lives above the humdrum and tedious. Not only do I dedicate my works to patrons, I will hold a private recital in their residence. Indeed I will often organize the whole evening’s entertainment, working hand in glove with my patron. I will discuss the catering arrangements with the patron and her cook, then I will bring in other, lesser poets, painters, acrobats, and even, gods help us, musicians. I can arrange everything from the moment a guest is assisted from their sedan chair to when the patron’s domestic staff finishing cleaning up after the event.

What can you tell us about your latest adventure?

 As a strictly unremunerated temple warden of the Shrine of Aea in Her Aspect as the Personification of Tempered Enthusiasm I do have some duties. It was as I assisted Maljie, the senior temple warden in ensuring that our incumbent wasn’t whisked away from us that I ended up dangling from a hot air balloon high in the mountains.

What did you first think when you first met Maljie?

Maljie is an older lady, (note I did not use the word ‘old’) and thus obviously wise. Personally, after working with her for some time I grew to have a wider appreciation of her talents. Whilst admitting to wise, I think I would have to insist on ‘redoubtable’, ‘cynical’ and ‘cunning.’

What was the scariest thing in your adventures?

For somebody who has, inadvertently, had to deal with dark mages, the walking dead, and any number of musicians of dubious morals, I always felt that I was reasonably hardened to whatever the world could throw at me. Yet still, I tend to twitch when somebody says, “The ladies felt you were the perfect person to judge the beauty context.”

What is the worst thing about like as a poet?

 Frankly the penury. The long hours, the demeaning comments, the constant petty carping, I can rise above. Honestly I don’t mind doing the occasional morning as a kitchen porter. But it would be nice to achieve a modest prosperity

What is the best thing about it?

In my better moments I’d say it is those occasions when I deliver a poem that I know to be good, and people I respect will come across afterwards, hand me a glass of wine, and say, ‘Tallis, that was fine work.’

In my less charitable moments I still remember fondly the time we dropped two dog fleas down the back of the shirt of that syrupy balladeer ten minutes before he was supposed to perform.

Tell us a little about your friends.

I suppose my two oldest friends are Calina Salin and Lancet Foredecks. We were street children together. Calina is a dancer, she is the one who will die a wealthy woman. Lancet is a performance artist. His last project was to find sponsors for a poem he was going to write, one line at a time, on the buoys that mark the channel into Port Naain. He was going to tune the bells on the buoys so as the tide came in they would play a tune.

Lancet I have had to rescue a number of times, he knows nothing of fear, and very little of self-preservation. Thus when an irritated mobster is going to have him dropped in the sea attached to an anvil, it’s always Tallis who has to talk people out of what even I can see is a reasoned response to immense provocation. As for Calina, I once saw her kick the hat off the head of a tall man who was irritating her.

Any romantic involvement?

I’m a respectably and happily married man. I could wax lyrical on the beauty of my lady wife, Shena, a mud jobber and a lady whose profession pays only slightly better than mine.

Whom (or what) do you really hate?

To be honest, genuine villains aren’t a problem. They may be criminals, they made be murdering thugs, or more probably hire them, but they are not, in all candor, the people I hate. After all, many of them have families, aged mothers who dote on them, and are often generous to poets. They are flesh and blood with strong feelings. The people I dislike most are those for whom ‘it is more than my job’s worth.’ People who might well flaunt their conscience, boast of their services to the city, yet would turn a grieving widow out into a winter night ‘because that’s what the regulations say.’

What’s your favourite drink, colour, and relaxing pastime?

Well if you’re buying, a glass of white wine please, and we can sit here and just swap anecdotes, tales of things that happened to us. Can you think of a more pleasant way to spend an evening?

What does the future hold for you?

Well there is another book on the way at some point. It’s about something that happened years ago, perhaps a darker tale at times that people expect from me.

Can you share a secret with us, which you’ve never told anyone else?

It has to be admitted that I may not be an entirely reliable narrator.

Jim Webster is probably still claiming to be fifty something, in spite of the evidence to the contrary. His tastes in music are eclectic, and his dress sense is rarely discussed in polite society. In spite of this he has a wife and three daughters. He has managed to make a living from a mixture of agriculture, consultancy, and freelance writing. Previously he has restricted himself to writing about agricultural and rural issues but including enough Ancient Military history to maintain his own sanity. But seemingly he has felt it necessary to branch out into writing fantasy and Sci-Fi novels. Admittedly it’s blatantly obvious from his sense of humour, but he is English, living in the North of England, pretty much where the hills come down to the sea.

You can find Tallis Steelyard on the pages of A Fear of Heights, as well as his many other books.

Join us next time to meet an ex-reporter specialising in zombies. Please follow the site by email (bottom-right) to be notified when the next interview is posted.

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Mary Carpenter Renbourn (of Return To Alpha, by Wesley Britton)

Dear readers, tonight with us is a woman from a near-future dystopia, where aliens have landed on our planet — now decimated by the effects of global warming and waves of weaponized plagues.

Tell us a little about where you grew up. What was it like there?

Hi everyone! You sure got me in a good mood!   I’m holding up my laughing baby and who wouldn’t be in a good mood holding up a laughing baby?

Anyway, I grew up in Dallas Texas after being conceived and born during the first Covid pandemic back in 2020-2021.  All through my childhood, I lived in a world where the human population shrank and shrank because of all the plagues released by the Everlasting Califate. Because of climate change, I was constantly hearing about how “things didn’t used to be like this.”

In many ways, I was a lucky only child as my parents were Affectionately Flirtatious every chance they got, especially at the kitchen table. As we lived through so many lock-downs and quarantines, living with so much parental love was about as good as you could get during those horrible decades.

What do you do now?

For most of my adult life, I was a special operative for Col. Ian Buell’s Dallas Infiltrator Unit before I was assigned undercover duty in the Caribbean.  Then I fell in love with Malcolm Renbourn II, the mutant half-alien from Beta-Earth. We became fugitives on the run from the Citadel prison and got married in a Pacific Northwest Native American settlement. Along with the rest of Malcolm’s alien family, we then hid in various remote sanctuaries in the Canadian wilderness where my son was born.

Right now, we’re exploring our possibilities, where it might be safe for us to live and raise our family, how public we can be, what we can contribute to Alpha as a family. I don’t want to tell you where we are now. Just not safe.

What can you tell us about your latest adventure?

After our relatively comfortable stay in a hidden Native American canyon city, we had to go on the run yet again as I was being pursued by vengeful Texas white terrorists who thought I should pay for destroying their murderous cell. The entire tribe was running from the president of the United States who wanted the aliens for propaganda. Add in  the governments of the Sovereign Southern Union and the Commonwealth of Independent States who wanted to lock up all the aliens fearing all the cosmic revelations they wanted to share. And me, well, I was AWOL. Strange to say, that was the least of my worries.

What did you first think when you first met and interrogated the Renbourn aliens?

At first, I thought of them as a job, my assignment to pry out secrets my superiors felt the Renbourns were suppressing. As a born again Christian, I didn’t like their talk about various deities from the multi-verse, not at all. I wanted to convert them to my beliefs. I didn’t accept Olrei’s prophetic gifts until I saw them bear fruit.

I quickly came to like , respect, and trust them all, Malcolm II in particular. Could anyone believe they’d meet their soul-mate after they jumped through universes to get here?  

What was the scariest thing in your adventures?

Without question, it was when the white supremacist found us in our wilderness hideaway, killed Olrei’s husband when they burned our dwelling down, captured me, tied me to a steell wall inside a stolen Rover, and whipped every part of my back and legs while we flew away before Malcolm and a group of Sasquatch found us and, well, you’ll have to read Alpha Tales 2044 to see how everything turned out.

What is the worst thing about living as a fugitive all over the North American continent?

Fearing we’ll never find a place we can call home where we can raise our children in peace and freedom. I want my son Randy-named after my father-to have a touch or two of normalcy in his life.

What is the best thing about your present life?

Living with my husband’s family, living with Malcolm, cradling Randy.

Tell us about your family.

As both my parents are dead, I was pretty much alone in the world until the aliens touched down in Jamaica.

Two of them are from Beta-Earth—including my genetically-enhanced husband. I often wonder what of his mutant attributes will carry over to our children.

His half-sister is the dark-skinned Kalmeg Renbourn, a very strong-willed woman who doesn’t suffer fools gladly. Since coming to Alpha-earth, she’s become something of a geography enthusiast.

Then there are the two teenagers from Cerapin-Earth. Olrei is the prophetess botanist widow of Akito Kawahara who was killed in the terrorist attack. She too has a newborn to protect while she’s going through a dark period of grief.  Lastly, there’s Scott Renbourn, the multi-colored typical teenage male still looking for his path in life.

Whom (or what) do you really hate?

In my experience as a special agent for several countries, I battled the Islamic terror network called the Everlasting Caliphate;   I battled a white Supremacist group called the Tex-zis; I fought a criminal organization called Hammerhead.  That doesn’t count all the small-time gangs I infiltrated back in Dallas. Let’s just say, I’ve seen a lot of the unsavory side of humanity.

What are some of your favorite things?

I wish I could have participated more in sports when I was growing up-that just wasn’t viable with all the waves of killer viruses. I can admit my one concession to vanity are my long auburn locks Malcolm loves playing with almost as much as I do. I enjoy traveling, most of the time, even when on duty. I like Caribbean and gospel music, I love dancing, I love going to church,  I love learning about  and loving my multi-versal tribe. I’ve always had a strong curiosity so I’m in the perfect situation to keep my mental skills active. To put it mildly.

What does the future hold for you?

We all wish we had a ghost of an idea what is possible for us. Will we stay together or split up? I rather doubt that, we’re so closely knit now. I know everyone would love to be able to join the human flow walking down city streets without worrying about one kind of attack or another.  I’d love to go to Pittsburgh and see the “Marivurn” spaceship the Renbourns flew to our earth in and see the museum devoted to their father who was captured in a Pittsburgh bank lobby.  I’d like to go to church or shopping without wearing disguises when I step out the door. It’s as if I’m always on duty even if I don’t report to anyone anymore.

I can tell you readers the next book in the Chronicles will be called Hammerhead and it will include thre pre-quels to Return to Alpha, meaning you’ll see me in action battling some of the enemies I mentioned above.

Can you share a secret with us, which you’ve never told anyone else?

I guess that would be my resentment I couldn’t attend the funerals for my parents as they passed during a quarantine while I was in training at FT. Hood and forbidden from traveling back to Dallas.  On the other hand, I know of so many other people whose experiences were so much worse than mine, even when they weren’t on the front lines like I was.

I know everyone wants to know what love-making is like with a genetically-enhanced mutant. Sorry, ain’t gonna tell ya. That’s for me to know and you to never find out.

Dr. Wesley Britton taught freshman English for over 33 years in Texas, Oklahoma, and Pennsylvania. As a Mark Twain scholar, his first publications were a number of articles on Twain and “Mark Twain: Cradle Skeptic,” his dissertation. He has been published numerous times in scholarly journals, online and print periodicals, encyclopedias, and essay collections. He published four books on fictional espionage and, so far, eight books in the Beta-Earth Chronicles. Retired, Wesley lives in Harrisburg, PA.

You can find Mary on the pages of Return To Alpha, and Alpha Tales 2044.

Join us next time to meet a poet, leading a strange lifestyle and encountering strange adventures. Please follow the site by email (bottom-right) to be notified when the next interview is posted.

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Angule (of Genesis – The IX Series, by Andrew P Weston)

Dear readers, tonight with us is an antagonist, a most intimidating character. This creature is here to tell us about its existence as a member of the Kresh – or as we call them, the Horde – a rampaging legion of mutated horrors that managed to overthrow an advanced space faring civilization at the height of its power.

The interview is set during the interval between the end of the prequel and the beginning of the main series itself, and reveals surprising details as to what makes these entities tick.

Who are you, and what is your role within the Horde?

My name is Angule, and I have assumed the mantle of Prime Catalyct of the Kresh. Or as you humanoids might say, I am the Field Marshal of the Horde army. Not that I have any inclinations of staying at the rear to direct things when the heat of battle is upon us. When the Kresh march, we fuel ourselves on the soul-rage that compels us to crush and dominate any and all who dare to stand in our way. That’s why puny humans and your Ardenese cousins, who, even now, hide behind the denying walls of their most prominent city, will fall. You fail to comprehend how irresistible the urge to fight and consume is.

Do you have any memories of who you were before you became the Prime Catalyct?

Such trivialities are inconsequential. All that matters is that I was chosen to emerge and feed and ascend into a higher being. Whatever or whoever it was that granted me the privilege of demonstrating my zeal for conquest, I can’t say … though my thoughts are troubled from time to time by whispers from the beyond, and fading memories of an existence prior to my elevation. Such recollections are foul indeed, for they hint of lesser things involving feelings, emotions and doubt. Or worse still, alien concepts of sorrow, remorse, mercy and love.

Emergence? Ascension? What are they, and how does feeding affect such a condition

Emergence is the act of becoming a real person. Someone who leaves ignorance behind in the never-ending quest for knowledge and truth.

Ascension is the ultimate state of being toward which all Kresh aspire.

When we first gain a measure of consciousness, we are near mindless automatons driven by berserker frenzy to feed. And to do that, we are drawn to anything containing the slightest measure of vitality: plasma conduits; computer screens; fuel cells; weaponized energy beams; explosive percussions. The more potent the better, for such exuberance brings with it an ever greater degree of self-awareness; an understanding or cognizance that promotes the generation of Jînnereth crowns – esoteric concentrations of cosmic quintessence – that purifies our wrath and boosts the range and scope of our psychic arsenal.

As for humans?

Ah, you are nothing to us but screaming electro-chemical snacks. Raw and puissant, to be sure, but snacks nonetheless.

Continue reading “Angule (of Genesis – The IX Series, by Andrew P Weston)” →
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