"Magician"

Tracy Lynne Oliver is a writer based in Los Angeles. She has been published online at a variety of places such as Medium, Fanzine, and Occulum. She co-authored the graphic novel, The Sacrifice of Darkness, with Roxane Gay. Her story, “This Weekend” was included in Best Microfiction 2019.

Her new book, Magician, is "dark magic debut novel featuring the Boy who becomes the Magician and the villainous Mother whose sadism might end it all."

Oliver applied the Page 69 Test to Magician with the following results::

From page 69:

Lesson learned, the Son stopped. Ignored the other’s throb against his inside. Swallowed its demanding. Halted all of it, making a sick inside him, offsetting his balance in how he grew in the world until many years faded the lesson and he began to bring small, again. Still afraid of the Mother, afraid of the other’s eager growing larger than he could contain, afraid if it spilled loose, it would take her from him. The Son kept it a marble inside his palm. It was very long before he became bolder, brought larger. The strength of his age skilled his command, and his new confidence matched with a post-child’s wisdom made the demonstrations less scary and easier confined. All of it still strong with secrecy, for buried underneath the passing of years; the scars of the lesson, ribboned and gouged.

My page 69 lends a small encapsulation of the first part of the novel. In this small paragraph it speaks about the Son swallowing his powers due to the fear of his Mother and how, with time and age, he brings that power forth once again, secretly. All of this tackled in the first quarter of the book. So, page 69 lends a shadowed glimpse at the whole, sort of like seeing the bottom half of a statue.

It also illustrates the way I use language in the book. You can tell by these mere 140 words, this novel will not read the same, sound the same, be processed the same as a standard novel.

Those two elements, together, I believe gives a good glimpse into the overall vibe of the book. A reader could be curious to want to find out….

“What was this lesson that scarred?”

“What is the otherness that he halted small until later, he brought it back?”

“Why the fear of the Mother?”

“What demonstrations did he bring later?”

“Why does this writing style feel weirdgood in my mindbrain? How else will she say things and how much (will) I want to take in that different?”

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--Marshal Zeringue