The difficulties in describing a complex story

I completed my novel Alarums of Reality last night. Describing it in a few words or even a lot of words is even more difficult than with my other novels. I've made three attempts at writing a back cover text, all woefully incomplete, even combined. Notice how they're all describing different parts of the story?

I'll probably go with the first though.

Back cover text:

The end is the beginning. The beginning is the end…

The once so great Caine Manor has become a ruin, one only fit for carrion birds and revenants. No one but daring children and crazed souls dare breach its confines.

The proud and shiny Caine Manor is an outstanding example of renovated architecture at the heart of the city.

Looking at the building, the house, resembling a castle, hidden in a strange, illuminated mist, squinting your eyes, it’s often hard to tell what’s illusion and what’s real. Reality shifts and burns around the Caine Manor, either ruin or proud house, reaching out with strands of night and fire to the surrounding areas and to existence at large. It is the center, or at least one center, in an ever-shifting world.

Is Chloe Webster dead or alive? Is Marion Dexter? Is Marlon Caine? Or David Fallon Somby? Are they perhaps both? Or neither? What is the world? Is it a brick, a hard, impenetrable wall or closer to something akin to mist and shadow? Existence might make sense, to us, to them, but only in glimpses, only in passing, beyond a corner somewhere ahead. They may wonder. They may die clueless. Because they don’t know, don’t know why terror strikes them and makes their heart beat like a sledgehammer in their chest.

From a place unbound by time and space alarums of reality are reaching out to touch and ultimately engulf them all.

Second back cover text:

The end is the beginning. The beginning is the end…

There is no rhyme, no reason.

WHO KILLED CHLOE WEBSTER?

WHO KILLED DAVID FALLON SOMBY?

These are the questions everybody is asking these days, but no one can answer them.

Not the investigative reporter, not the wife that murdered her husband, not the husband that killed his wife, not the old man in the old house and certainly not the two detectives investigating the cases.

A lot is mysteriously absent.

But that is reality… isn’t it? There will always be pieces of the puzzle missing, absent in any equation, any painting of existence. We can claim otherwise, but when it comes down to it we know that not all the pieces fit the puzzle, know that nothing is as it seems.

One witness account to any given event is just that, incomplete, in the great scheme of things. What happened? What truly happened? The truth is only glimpsed by those digging deeper, seeking below the surface, beyond the veil, down there, in the boiling waters…

Third back cover text:

The end is the beginning. The beginning is the end…

Chloe Webster is dead, and no one seems to know why…

Did the estranged, former husband kill her? Was it the scorned girlfriend of a lover, or an unknown assailant she encountered during her nightly excursions into the unknown and dangerous parts of human existence?

Chloe was a seeker, a dabbler in the occult, a frequent participant in such obscure circles.

All her life she sought what’s hidden, what rests (or doesn’t rest) below the surface of everyday life, and those claiming knowledge of such things claim that she finally found it, found what she was looking for.

She was observed while she moved into the old hotel, the old building by the lake, observed while casting spells and performing occult ceremonies in the dead of night. Witness-accounts place her at dozens of seedy bars and occult stores and events around the world. Her life, also the final seven nights is fairly well documented. There is little controversy over the facts, but lots of it over what’s mysteriously absent. The final, revealing clues elude private and official investigators alike.

After years of rabid research she returned to the shores of the lake, on her path to her destiny, to what some calls her predestined fate. Truth, unquestionable and unopposed awaits her in the land and streets by the lake, and the distant and ancient and beyond mysterious Caine Manor…

Incorporate - The Dreamweaver at work

I incorporate my surroundings in my writing, my art. I see a tree, a street or a situation, and it’s burned into my memory. It stays there, live there, changes there or not, and it’s put on paper, like they would have said in the old days, before all writing all art changed, with the onset of the computer and portable laptop.

When I travel all new places stay with me. And even though I’m fairly good at describing places I’ve never been, too, you would probably know where I’ve been by reading what and how I’ve written about a given place or city. Up until recently I’ve usually written about real places. Now, with new books, like the Afterglow series and Alarums of Reality I’m creating cities and cityscapes in what I experience as a new thing for me. I’m building them, from scratch, taken a piece here, an image, a smell there, and changing them into something new and different. At least I am doing it more consciously than before.

I’m evolving yet again, and it feels good, so good. What any decent artist should worry about is growing stale, festering like a closed-off pond.

Lately I’ve spent a lot of time in what you might consider my hometown and area. I walk through and pass by places almost every day, and even if that’s not a situation I’m comfortable with, I’ve discovered it has its uses. One side of a building is one book, one story, the other a completely different scenario, miles, and even an entire universe away. I dream, like I always do, and I create upon it, into other dreams and nightmares and yearnings and failings and everything.

Even in the midst of desolation there are dreams and rebellion and liberation.