The Threshold I

THE THRESHOLD – VOLUME I

Can you live without feelings? What would people turn into if they had to give up kindness, fun, faith, honesty, altruism and the truth?

From its very first pages the novel tosses its readers into a world where nothing is what it seems to be. The story has a dynamic beginning outlining an incident in which Cat, a petty thief and a crook, steals a bag. Only that the thief is not a man but a metamorph and the bag contains the key to the survival of the world: a box filled with … feelings which Lia alone can keep alive and feed.

Lia, the beautiful, vulnerable yet invincible heroine of the novel, belongs to the kin of healers and her destiny is to save the world from those wishing to destroy it. Among them – Alk, her father, the second Lord Secretary of the Agency, and Kor, her step brother, who wants absolute power and would trample over everything and everybody to get what he wants.

Lia and her protectors want to recover the bag as everything depends on it. This is the start of an adventure in which chases, conflicts, confrontations and turnarounds are cascading one after another without respite.

There are some who want to get hold of the box and of Lia and others who gather around her to protect her: Kat, a woman of the feared kin of the Krabors, a fighter with paranormal powers; Crius, Kat’s uncle, a recognised leader in the Land of the Lakes; Algar, a former legionnaire who has sided with the rebels; Volkoff, a member of the High Council; Sammy, one the heads of the rebellion against the Oreads; Oz, a mutant who can send mental messages across great distances…

The fight for the box containing feelings is fought against the background of a general conflict, in a world where everyone is at war with everyone else and alliances are made and unmade in the blink of an eye. The clans fight each other and the Oreads, the Agency and the League have conflicting interests. And then there are the Collectors who take advantage of the overall madness to dispossess debtors of their feelings and then store them in an underground bank.

As the story evolves, Lia falls in love with Crius, Algar falls for Kat and the box ends up in the waters of the Black Lake, the heartland of Onion Head, a weird and terrifying creature who has machinations and interests of his own.

There is no neutrality in the Land of the Lakes. Everyone gets involved in a conflict in which at stake is the survival not only of the individual or of the clan but of the species as well. Even inanimate objects have a will and a personality of their own: the Bridge That Ends When the Mood Strikes It, the Crazy Elevator, the Merry Fountain, the Deserted Railway Station are not merely decorative, they are involved in the plot tipping the balance between good and evil.

Furthermore, the non-human characters seem the results of a downright demiurgic imagination: the Mime, the creator of the caterpillars that can shapeshift into anybody or anything, the Urs, the formidable soldiers of the League, with their Herculean strength and pestilential stench, the Spearviper, the Legionnaires’ frightening weapon, from the blood of which a drug is extracted ‘that makes you believe you are God’, Grassen, the gigantic feathered pig that can swallow a whole house erasing its memory from the mind of the community, the carnivorous Lantern Flowers within the lighting network of the  City Below, the weeping trees, the Kracs, Leona, a woman who has lived thousands of years thanks to Zeeatine, a substance representing ‘immortality in its pure form’…

And, the centrepiece of everything, Lia. Epic battles are fought for her between the Krabors and the legionnaires armed with their lethal Spearvipers, it is her that the Oreads chase from Kat’s house and Mira’s brothel to the underground tunnels of the city where the heroine makes new allies: the Kracs, a merry and free kin to which Neell, a cute and friendly cub, also belongs.

The storyline also involves Cat and his new comrade-in-mischief the Fare Dodger (a.k.a.  “Baconling”), the son of a collector, who can communicate with the Bridge That Ends When the Mood Strikes It. The two characters interfere in the plot, sometimes with good intentions. However, as they have no idea what is going on around them they end up inconveniencing everybody. They run away, they are caught, they escape from prison, they blow up the Bank of Feelings killing the creature that produced the priceless Zeeatine, and then they are saved by the Crazy Elevator and join the rest of the characters on the platform of the Deserted Railway Station.

It is here that Lia and Crius manage to open the box and give back to the inhabitants of the Land of the Lakes the feelings that were stolen from them. But, there is a price to pay. Lia’s brother, Kor, asks for her heart in return.

Lia accepts. She sacrifices her love in order to save the world in which she was born. She then boards the Train, aware that there is small chance that she may ever come back … The two lovers are separated, Kor stays on as the ruler of the Land of the Lakes, and the Train leaves the station. Everything seems lost, but … Cat and the Fare Dodger have boarded the train as well, as stowaways on the road towards a new adventure.