Upper Rubber Boot Books

The Mask Game

The Mask Game: released 7 December 2013.

ISBN 978-1-937794-20-0 (epub). ISBN 978-1-937794-18-7 (mobi). ISBN 978-1-937794-19-4 (pdf). Out of print. Discuss this book at Goodreads and LibraryThing.

In this irresistible novel, Ukrainian author Sergey Gerasimov tells the tale of a man with fourteen twists of fate embedded in his arm.

The child of a man who had cheated death, if only temporarily, and a woman who had despaired of having children until she buried a pear seed in her garden, and watched over by a mysterious old woman whose ears never stop twitching, Herodion must journey the world to find fourteen secrets from the Broken Glass Age and discover the true purpose of the aliens’ three great gifts to mankind before he can be reunited with his love.

Part fantasy, part science fiction, and part magical realism, this is a tremendously entertaining and exciting tale from a very talented author.

Sergey Gerasimov on writing The Mask Game:

The novel The Mask Game was written in about 500 brief sessions of automatic writing, and then the fragments were put together and edited. I have big enough experience with automatic writing as well as drawing (or almost automatic because some editing is always necessary), for example, my story that appeared in Clarkesworld and some other stories written in Russian were written using the automatic writing method. As far as I know, The Mask Game is the only complete fantasy novel ever written through automatic writing, which is not just a nonsensical text, but a book with a substantial plot, that includes many twists, themes, subplots, and questions remaining unanswered until near the end, where all the plot lines dovetail one into another, which makes this book unique.

Other work by Sergey Gerasimov available online:

• “The Glory of the World,” Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 22, July 2008.
• “The Most Dangerous Profession,” Fantasy, April 2009.
• “Speaking About Pancakes,” Strange Horizons, 15 December 2008.

Reviews:

As any familiar with the podcast will tell you, when I compare this book to Welcome to Night Vale, that is no small compliment. There’s a weird sort of internal logic that pervades the story, but what Welcome to Night Vale does for Lovecraft, the Mask Game does with fairy tales.

— Christopher, “Review of The Mask Game by Sergey Gerasimov,” Probably Fiction, 31 December 2013.

7 December 2013

Sergey Gerasimov

Author photo by Denis Bushuev

Sergey Gerasimov lives in Kharkov, Ukraine. It is a country in a remote region of the world (somewhere in the geographical center of Europe), where no one speaks English, but finds it convenient to speak Ukrainian and Russian instead. He graduated from Kharkov University as a theoretical physicist and worked for ten years teaching physics. Later, he became interested in psychology, and has published some theoretical psychology articles in Russian academic journals and magazines and a book about the psychology of ideas, published electronically in Russia. He started writing fiction in 1991, and about a hundred of stories, three hardcover novels, and two paperback novels had appeared in various places before he decided to write in English. Since 2006, his stories have appeared, among other places, in Clarkesworld Magazine, Fantasy Magazine, Adbusters, Strange Horizons, and Oceans of the Mind. The Mask Game is his first novel written in the English language.

Books for Upper Rubber Boot:

The Mask Game: released 7 December 2013. ISBN 978-1-937794-20-0 (epub) is available for iPad, Nook, etc. at Barnes & Noble (UK & USA), Kobo, and the Apple iStore (AR, AT, AU, BE, BG, BO, BR, CA, CH, CL, CO, CR, CY, CZ, DE, DK, DO, EC, EE, ES, FI, FR, GR, GT, HN, HU, IE, IT, JP, LT, LU, LV, MT, MX, NI, NL, NO, NZ, PA, PE, PL, PT, PY, RO, SE, SI, SK, SV, UK, USA, YV). ISBN 978-1-937794-18-7 (mobi) is available for Kindle on Amazon (AU, BR, CA, DE, ES, FR, IN, IT, JP, MX, UK, USA). ISBN 978-1-937794-19-4 (pdf) is available at Smashwords.

Other work by Sergey Gerasimov available online:

• “The Glory of the World,” Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 22, July 2008.
• “The Most Dangerous Profession,” Fantasy, April 2009.
• “Speaking About Pancakes,” Strange Horizons, 15 December 2008.

17 August 2012