The Raven Chronicles

When I was a kid, a friend gave my mother a collection of Greek Myths, which I borrowed and read voraciously. This is where I learned storytelling. What made people tick, what motivated them, why they had to struggle so hard, where they hoped to go in life, and how they explained its events. To me gods were not about cosmology, but they gave explanation to things that had no explanation.

My first book, which has since expanded into The Raven Chronicles, was inspired by the North American mythical figure the Raven. My novel started out as a mystery/romance set in an archaeology dig in the San Juan Islands of the Pacific Northwest, and morphed into a thriller with the underlying idea of the Raven once having been a man—that is, a shaman. This shaman had all the characteristics of the Raven figure seen in west coast art. Among his Haida creators he was a character of honour and derision, who created the earth and humanity, and had the powers of a hero, trickster and transformer. He was also a womanizer, who was restless, curious and easily bored. Constantly in search of exciting adventures, his voracious appetite for food and sex got him into deep trouble. He avoided rules in order to keep himself entertained. Sounds like a real person, right? These characteristics I incorporated into my hero Jake Lalonde—except for the part about creating Earth and humanity.

Jake Lalonde is the descendent of a 10,000-year-old shaman who dreams the dreams of his ancestors. In modern life he has encountered people who also share this heritage. And in his search to understand his special gift, he explores the origins and migration of the Raven icon, his family’s crest.

The Raven icon exists all over the world, and is, perhaps, connected. What if the Raven started somewhere in Siberia, travelled across the ice-free corridor (after the ice age) and migrated down the coast of North America from Alaska, through British Columbia to Washington telling stories of his antics and adventures, only to have those tales change in the retelling, and spread out across the world, when his descendants took to the sea and made a journey to the South Pacific. And even to Europe? Here is where my imagination takes a flying leap.

When I began writing the Raven books, I started in the middle of the cycle, in the time when Jake’s life is more or less ordinary and he explores his past through archaeology. But with the writing of each subsequent novel, the supernatural nature of his ancestry is taking over. And as I explore Jake’s past and his relationships with the people important to his world, I am beginning to see where his supernatural heritage began.

To this end I have written a prequel, (currently only available on Kindle) called Raven Dawn. In this short novel archaeologist Jake Lalonde gets the first clues to his cryptic Haida heritage when the abduction of children from a small Vancouver Island town brings the myth of an ancient cannibal demon to life. So begins Jake’s spirit quest as he sets out to search for the origins of his totem crest.