Roadmap to Amelia

The Beast and the Forgotten Tribesman (first in series)

A brief greeting and salutations, readers. I’m Joshua T. Calkins-Treworgy, and I’d like to start by thanking you for making the purchase of this work from Untreed Reads. Let’s dive into a quick introduction to this first work and to the series as a whole, shall we?

The Beast and the Forgotten Tribesman started off, for me, as a sort of challenge I made to myself to try and write up a quick “creature feature” sort of tale. I remember wanting the pace of the story to be tight and rushed, with brief moments wherein the protagonist, a homeless vagabond living on the streets of Amelia City, would have just enough time to formulate a singular line of thought or momentary planning and nothing more. I wanted to offer an immediate sense of danger and urgency, and place the main protagonist in circumstances which would from the word “go” leave most normal people a shuddering pile of nerves.

As for the Roads Through Amelia series as a whole, each story was originally put together of its own accord until one day, while looking over Faith in Amelia, I realized that I’d used several of the elements and characters from Comedy and Tragedy, another tale, to act as a foundation following through into its own narrative. Likewise, I took a look back at this first story you’ll be reading here (as it was the first one in the series that I actually wrote back at the time), and chuckled quietly to myself. I’d used the same fictional town/city region in terms of the location of these stories.

Having already laid out the basic framework of the rest of the tales to come, I decided that I would take a handful of these shorts and rework them in their final drafts to take place in Amelia City. Why did I decide to do this? Well, every town has its fair share of spooky stories and cautionary tales, usually told at night to heighten the collective atmosphere of tension and fear for the listeners. There’s a house, or a cemetery, or a school, or some other singular location that is haunted, hexed, cursed, or jinxed. Misfortune befalls anybody who dares go near.

I thought about that, and wondered this; what if an entire town, city, perhaps even a whole county, were similarly rife with the supernatural and macabre?

The Roads Through Amelia series offers some potential answers to that very inquiry and, with any luck and skill on my part, will lay the foundation for a body of works and tales surrounding Amelia City and all of its grim, unnatural events as time moves forward. The world is a scary place, some folks say, as a way of trying to explain why such awful things happen all around us in our everyday life.

Those folks are right. The world really is a scary place. After reading all of the entries of Roads Through Amelia, I’m willing to bet plenty of folks would gladly take the world they live in over the one I present to them.

—Joshua T. Calkins-Treworgy

April 18th, 2010