Tower

Tower is my first novel. I started writing it when I was working as a doctor, and finished my first draft during the covid lockdowns. It was the first major piece of fiction I'd written since high school, and it felt liberating to start making new things again after the prescriptions of university and medical life. It's not that anyone told me to stop making new things, I just fell out of the habit.

I've always enjoyed narrative-heavy literature with a fantastical element, such as The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, or Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut. Such books use superficial inaccuracies (the devil didn't come to Soviet-era Moscow, the existence of Tralfamadorians has not been confirmed, etc, etc) to reveal something true in a deeper sense; this is something I sought to do with Tower, and I think I was mostly successful.

In addition to literature, the STALKER game series inspired Tower in a very significant way. Less the plot of these games, but more the atmosphere and art direction. The Red Forest, the brain scorcher, Limansk-13 and Pripyat all carry a sense of concrete menace that I tried to reproduce in sections of Tower.

A final source of inspiration was in music, mostly the band Yellow Eyes and Celestial-era Isis.

Shout out to @davidsartwork (he’s on Instagram), who did the cover art for Tower.