What do we need to know about this book?
It begins on Earth as the protagonist returns from a deployment to Afghanistan, only to find that his wife has left him for someone else and his father has died. The MC travels to the funeral of his father, a semi-famous fantasy novelist, where he meets and befriends two of his father’s fans. He finds a key in his father’s belongings and enlists his new friends in a convoluted scavenger hunt that lands all three of them in the dangerous post-apocalyptic world of his father’s novels.

Through a series of mishaps and triumphs, they discover that his father’s muse — an immortal creature called a “Silen” — was fighting to protect existence itself from others of his own kind. The Sileni rebels are planning to use their powers of persuasion to wreak havoc on the universe in retaliation for being forced into a life of creative servitude.

The climactic battle happens in a dream-place and puts the reader into the shoes of a writer, anthropomorphizing self-doubt and using the narrative as a piece of the story itself as the MC literally writes and edits the supporting characters out of the prison the Sileni have put them in. The first book ends in a cliffhanger as the Sileni come at the protagonists with what nearly destroyed the characters in Dad’s original series (which is alluded to throughout Whirlwind as snippets of Dad’s series are peppered between Whirlwind’s chapters).

First book?
I am in the process of writing the sequel, which focuses on the secondary character Noreen, and plan on it being a trilogy, which will focus on each of the three main characters. Book Two will leave the writer-metaphors behind and go for more of an action-oriented, spaghetti-western approach, but still retain much of the abstract flavor that made the original so compelling.

You’ve talked of fantasy, science fiction worlds, complex structures and now Westerns. We can’t even begin to guess how you’d label this!
Fantasy (contemporary).

What kind of readers will it appeal to?
It was inspired by Stephen King’s “Dark Tower” series, but I like to think my voice is a bit of a mixture between King and Gaiman, in that I utilize King’s sensibilities and feel for supernaturalizing the mundane, but like Gaiman, my references to myths and the threads of mysticism running through my work are more overt and playful. I’m a huge fan of Dan Simmons as well, which is where my wordiness comes from.

So if you like King’s spaghetti-western-fantasy series, Gaiman’s “American Gods” quasi-series (including “Anansi Boys” of course), you might like my abstract, horrific, sometimes goofy fantasy novel.

You’ve already answered our next question which is usually “if you like______, you’ll love this book”.
If you like going to beautiful new places, meeting exciting new people, and not always knowing what the hell is going on around you, you’ll (hopefully) love my book.

Have you written any other books that we should read next?
If you like horror, you might get a kick out of my horror anthology “If You Could Read My Mind“.

Tell us a bit about yourself.
Well, what would you like to know? I don’t want to answer too much because that would take too much of the fun out of the interview. I’m an Army veteran and I’ve been to Afghanistan. I lived in Alaska for a summer and I’d love to go back. I make art in addition to writing fiction. I was born and raised on the river that Deliverance was filmed on, and I don’t know anybody that plays a banjo.

That’s a fun word to say. Banjo banjo banjo.

I used to sleep every two days.

Do you have a website where we can keep up with your work?
http://theusualmadman.net/.

How can we follow you on Twitter and/or Facebook?
I’m not very active on Twitter or Facebook, but you’re more than welcome to circle me on Google+ — I’m extremely active there. http://gplus.to/samuelhunt.

What’s next?
Right now I’m working on the sequel to Whirlwind, called “Law of the Wolf”, which follows our crew as some of them end up back on Earth, and Noreen discovers her destiny as a Griever.