The Chronicles by Elia of Gareth  

The Mystery of NightGlen

Author: Antonio Carlos Pinto

Gliding shadows await all readers to sense the spirits. Cursed bloodlines don’t get cured and their enchanted clamor gets frenzied down the familial ties making strident melancholy seep across NightGlen. Here the past is not yet over and the present is warped into the past. Such a convoluted timeline is congenial to the hulking captors of the Kingdom of NightGlen to keep it subsumed in darkness. The author is ruthless in making his readers white-knuckled at the sinister pogrom of the Universe of Sombroespério.

The Shadowthorn mansion with towers and battlements straddling a mountaintop for ages presents a piquant setting with a whiff of ‘mystery and power’. A well-organized school of witchcraft exists aplomb in this village in NightGlen where lineages of forbidden cults have mastered the occults to hold the world at stake. Elia, a daunting spinster comes to learn the forbidden rituals in this school of witchcraft. Her entire family for generations has been into sorcery. Here Elia sees her estranged father Gareth in the thick of haunted history grating him into utter silence. Elia chronicles the forbidden passage of time of her family’s buried past of horrors and comes to salvage the terror-stricken Kingdom of NightGlen.

The magical world of mysteries tends to rip your sensibilities into fantasy vérité. NightGlen is fraught with evil spirits. The cursed bloodlines of the Shadowthorn family and Gareth family bear entangled destinies. ‘Magic is woven in familial bonds, and darkness is challenged by the light emanates of hearts’ There is the ‘Realm of Enchantment...where words are spells and the past merges with the present…through the ages’.

The account gets heightened all the more owing to the lead figure Elia being a young damsel who masquerades into the forbidden. This choice of soft character has made a difference in arousing the reader's pathos. At a certain point in time, the surreptitious intentions of Elia being in the village are found out by Adelaide Darkthorn. But who is finding the secret of whom? And what is Elia’s father up to? Why did Elia want to make a good impression upon the Shadowthorn while her father Gareth was against them?  ‘I was so irreversibly linked in some way to that family.’ feels Elia. ‘The visit to Shadowthorn Manor provided me with valuable information, but it also raised more questions than I could count.’ – Elia says to herself.

An estranged father meets his grown-up daughter for the first time – ‘Gareth tried to smile when he saw me, but his worried look couldn’t be masked. Over a casual question of neighbor, - ‘Gareth frowned a look of dismay I hadn’t seen in many moons. A vein throbbed in his temple, a clear sign of discontent.’ Such was the morbidity striking at every twirl of Elia. My father, Gareth, was involved in these events in a way that he himself did not fully understand.’ Antonio has devised such an incisive technique to mortify readers gasping for an escape from this psychic dragnet.

NightGlen cast its haunting déjà vu upon Elia. ‘An ancient dormant force awaited release, and was I the key to freeing it?’ Elia narrates – ‘As the night progressed I witnessed ancient rituals and disturbing revelations’. 

The author has sowed distrust among familial ties. Considering their closeness, the pairs of Darius and Adelaide; Elia and Gareth; and Darius and Elia; should have genuine conformity in their action and deeds. But utter distrust prevails and the reader is baffled at their every move. Darius warns, ‘Be careful, Elia…not everything is as it seems in my family.’ Does Darius really want Elia to know the truth behind the NightGlen attacks and their family? Does Adelaide really welcome Elia into their Shadowthorn mansion? Such a hunch-nudging Elia rakes up hidden past to build the reading tempo.

There was a curse squirming in and out of NightGlen. The author successfully moves across open ends to find a state of bafflement. What appears to be at a certain stage subsequently emerges as an entirely different situation or fact. Who welcomes Elia and who disdains her? Turbidity grows further with the diligent study of potions.

Scooped-out time has left a void of enchantment and melancholia to go ‘crackling with occult power.’ Unexplained human injuries – sightings of unknown nocturnal creatures instill ‘magic that permeates every inch of this enchanted pace’.

Imagine two damsels doing night patrols during perilous encounters daring to sniff the ominous vibes at the Glade of shadows. There are indeed secret training sessions for magicians to fight spirits. Antonio builds up every inch of the atmosphere with suspense conflicting thoughts and confounding speculations. Amidst all this terror, romance is brimming up within two souls that may be torn apart, considering the several hitches that lie between them. 

The author cracks his story into an unprecedented recess to suck in any reader. Wiping out a satan is beyond any sorcery. And vroom! Everything goes for a toss! Lord Dammus is back to damn all! Enchantment keeps manifesting in the fluid motion of elements. ‘The shadows danced, twisting and intertwining like ethereal tentacles.’

The exorcist becomes the witch of light! The reader has to bear all this. Satan strikes a dastardly deal with NightGlen. The pall of utter darkness engulfs the Kingdom of NightGlen now a cursed land. The Daarzak’s curse has subsumed all.

Antonio Carlos Pinto is the creator of "Sombroespério", a ploy to transmute conventions through a myriad of influences. This tack of variegated imagination is churned out of Gothic, romantic, modernist, and post-modernist notions along with Shakespearian eloquence with torrid Neo-Romanticism to reify a fantabulous state. For instance “poured the tea called clairvoyance into my cups, explaining that it was a magical variety grown in that region, capable of expanding the perception of whoever drank it.’Sinister pogrom claims déjà vu ancestry cutting across bloodlines. Sombroespério is all out to mince human piece of mind. Antonio vivifies all this with a grating mystery to unnerve even the formidable reader. 

And now, Antonio Carlos Pinto has ushered 'The Chronicles of Elia de Gareth' into its sequel 'The Witch of Shadowthorn'.

Paperback:172 pages