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Editorial Review Product Description
Painting Souls is the first novel in a revolutionary fantasy series. The first two chapters have purposely been left out in order to correspond with the future movie opening due to come out at the same time as the third novel in the series.
Painting Souls introduces live, detailed action sequences into the genre, while maintaining an intricate, and also very meaningful tale. Bleeding the pens of classic fantasy fiction and anime together, great heroes unravel cryptic philosophies and romances while exploring new depths of spirituality and magic.
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"biological cells churning around a soul"
On page 300 of PAINTING SOULS there is a map of the imaginary planet Celestia. Elsewhere we learn that this world is inexplicably young. It has been around for only 200,000 years. Celestia is the fourth planet of one of its two suns (perhaps of both), as we learn during a lecture to young multi-species students of the Ibiza Peacekeeping Academy. Inhabitants of the planet are distributed across eight continents. They include (selecting a few of them in the alphabetical order of "The Races of Celestia" (pps. 295 - 299):
Afina ... tiny, mostly female, fairies,
Ancients ... they witnessed the birth of Celestia,
Celians ... plant-like beings that can meld with organic matter; they are the most populous race on the planet,
Dragons ... there are millions of them in more than a thousand species,
Gantis ... "large rock creatures,"
Humans ... one group is fascinated by technology, others "rarely concern themselves with outside negativity,"
Lucrene ... machines that coexist intermingled with Humans; cooperation in producing goods is what they find most exhilarating; their capital city, Providence, houses Celestia's greatest school,
Magi ... a hidden race, with bodies seeming like something between solid and gas,
Orcs ... once titanic battlers, now shrunken in numbers, inclined to be peaceful.
These races seem capable of and interested in inter-species matings which produce creatures of all colors of the rainbow, including full-vampires, half-vampires and other lovingly described permutations. The book is very visual with memorable descriptions of vividly imagined fictitious plants suffused in magic and often living in symbiotic relationship with the various intelligent races of Celestia.
At yarn's beginning, a great war has just ended in which an Alliance of good freedom-loving entities has apparently definitively defeated evil hordes led by the Wraith or the Shadow. But all is not as it seems. Two human male heroes, a 35-year old career warrior named Adrian and a 16-year old student named Gai, separately advance the plot. They do not know each other personally, but both have had great family tragedies during the late war. Both are self-centered and obsessed with figuring out if there is any reason why unnamed higher powers have placed them on Celestia at this juncture. They are separately sent for suspicious reasons on parallel quests designed to assure permanent peace to their planet. In the process they fight, they philosophize, they learn, they are tempted, they are misled, they play into the hands of the remaining powers of darkness.
PAINTING SOULS has a striking cover reminiscent of Salvador Dali. In his Prelude, author Benjamin Dudley urges the reader to ponder his vivid imaginings with care and to grasp the difference, inter alia, "between the cover picture and the title." I remain uninitiated, alas, in that difference, which is no doubt rooted in omni-present but never explained "magic." I do not recall the phrase "painting souls" appearing anywhere in the narrative. But the following passage is evocative, perhaps, of what the author is hinting at in the Prelude:
"The Lucerne are not as other races; they aren't composed of biological cells churning around a soul, but machinery. ... They ... yearn to produce, upgrade, and build" (Ch. XVII, p. 269).
I hope this sketch of PAINTING SOULS gives adult readers enough of a sense of what the author is trying to do to decide whether or not to give the book as a birthday or holiday present to any of their sons, grandaughters or nieces who are endowed with highly developed imaginations.-OOO
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