We are happy to feature a new author with her colourful and stormy book called: "The End of the Dark and Stormy Night."

If we assume that God exists, what path do you think will lead straight to Salvation?

This is the question Rajni Mala Khelawan seeks to answer in her debut fiction novel, “The End of the Dark and Stormy Night,” set in Elkford, BC.

For Mrs. Anand, a Hindu, not eating cows is the answer.
For this reason, she hates Jesse, the red-haired cow eater who married her talentless writer son, Ravi.

For Mrs. Hicks, a legalist, being born-again is the only road to Salvation.  And she is convinced that Jesus hates all lesbians.
Her daughter, Elisha, a full-blown lesbian, also has her own theories of how lesbians find Salvation.

Set in Elkford, British Columbia, Canada. (Elkford is a picturesque Rocky Mountain town founded in 1971 as a home for miners working at newly-established Fording Coal operations. From its early days as a collection of temporary homes, a one-room school, and a single general store, Elkford has grown to its current population of nearly 3,000 residents.)

CHAPTER 1

It was a dark and stormy night…

Ravi sat in front of his Macintosh. It must have been the glare of the monitor that affected his sight, for he was momentarily blinded. He was not blind in an ordinary sense: he could see the physical world around him quite clearly. Rather, he was blind to the fact that he was a writer born without a shred of talent. Oddly enough, he was aware of an energy channel of sorts… a connection… between him and his computer. And he always thought that this connection was what defined him as a true writer: he believed that true writers had a special relationship with their medium. What the medium was did not matter. It could be a computer, a paper, or even a chalkboard (in spite of the chalk dust!). Ravi decided that he had this connection, that he was a real writer even though he had not published anything yet.

It was a dark and stormy night…

Ravi sat there, staring at his monitor. All writers experienced writer‟s block. It was only natural. Even Anil Singh – the king of horror novels – experienced it while writing The Cemetery. (The Cemetery was 1174 pages long, and one needed a magnifying glass to read the words on each page. And yet Singh had experienced the block somewhere after writing 300 or so pages.)

Ravi was experiencing the block on his first page. Sometimes he managed to write a whole page, but by the end of the day he had thrown it away and started over again – as many writers do.

It was a dark and stormy night in Elkford, British Columbia…

Write what you know – the number one rule of writing. It was reasonable that Ravi added Elkford, British Columbia, to establish the setting of his story, as he was born and raised there. As a matter of fact, he had never left. Elkford was a small coal-mining town in the heart of the Rockies. His mausi (aunt from the mother's side of the family) used to humor Elkfordians by saying that she dared not to blink while Mausa drove to Elkford, because if she did, she might miss it. And his dad, Rajen Anand, worked in the Elkford coalmines. Anand bragged about making forty dollars per hour without a university education. “You ain't gonna find a better deal anywhere, Son,” he would say.

It was a dark and stormy night in Elkford, British Columbia…


The novel is available for purchase at all major online retailers such as Amazon.com and Amazon.ca.