The Doors You Mark Are Your Own

by Okla Elliott, Raul Clement, Aleksandor Tuvim

Overview

Joshua City is one of seven city-states in a post-apocalyptic world where water is scarce and technology is at mid-twentieth-century Soviet levels. As the novel opens, the Baikal Sea has been poisoned, causing a major outbreak of a flesh-eating disease called nekrosis. Against this backdrop of political corruption, violence and oppression, a struggle for control of Joshua City ensues, and a revolutionary group called The Underground emerges.

The Doors You Mark Are Your Own is a sweeping literary epic—the result of years of painstaking writing and world-building by two brilliantly imaginative minds—that readers will get lost in and never want to end.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781940430201
Publisher:	Curbside Splendor Publishing
Publication date:	04/28/2015
Series:	Casey, Crime Photographer #01
Pages:	724
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.70(d)

About the Author

Okla Elliott is currently an Illinois Distinguished Fellow at the University of Illinois, where he works in the fields of comparative literature and trauma studies. He also holds an MFA in creative writing from Ohio State University. His non-fiction, poetry, short fiction, and translations have appeared in Another Chicago Magazine, Harvard Review, Indiana Review, The Literary Review, New Letters, A Public Space, The Southeast Review, and Subtropics, among others. He is the author of a collection of short fiction, From the Crooked Timber, and a collection of poetry, The Cartographer’s Ink. He is also the co-editor, with Kyle Minor, of The Other Chekhov.

Raul Clement lives in Urbana, IL. His fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have been published in Blue Mesa Review, Coe Review, As It Ought to Be, and the Surreal South '09 anthology. He is an editor at New American Press and Mayday Magazine.

Editorial Reviews

01/12/2015
Set in the aftermath of a “Great Calamity” that destroyed entire nations and spoiled the world’s water supply, this futuristic epic evokes numerous other post-apocalyptic tales without breaking any new ground. Its large cast of characters includes many personality types common to the subgenre: Mayor Adams, a warmongering politician with dictatorial ambitions; two brothers, Marcik and Nikolas Kovalski, who rise to prominence in the national army and drift into the revolutionary underground respectively; and Adrian Talbot, an idealistic medical student whose work takes him into the ravaged Outer Provinces, where feuding armies of the Seven Cities battle each other for dominance. The predictable arc of the narrative disperses these and other citizens of Joshua City (“the greatest of the Seven Cities”) on personal adventures, and then draws them back together toward the novel’s end. Ellliott and Clement manage to keep the plot on track, but fans of dystopian fiction may feel that they’ve read this all before. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

"An epic tale of good and evil."
—Kirkus Reviews

"The Doors You Mark Are Your Own is a dystopian masterpiece."
—Kyle Minor, author of Praying Drunk and In the Devil's Territory

"The Doors You Mark Are Your Own is one of those intriguing, compelling books that defy description, or, the impact is a reflection of keen imagination, surprises, a new vision, but yet one that is rock-ribbed intriguing. All I can say is that you should read this and enjoy it, since it is a rare thing, a very rare thing indeed, when something new comes into the world."
—Craig Nova, author of Wetware and The Good Son

"If Vladimir Nabokov and Phillip K. Dick had mated and produced a genius baby, that baby might well have grown up to write The Doors You Mark Are Your Own. Inspired, thrilling literary madness of the best possible sort."
—Pinckney Benedict, author Dogs of God and Miracle Boy and Other Stories

From the Publisher

03/15/2015
Elliott and Clement waste no time obfuscating the ownership of this novel: the cover itself names them as translators and attributes authorship to the fictional Aleksandr Tuvim, a character assigned to write the story of Nikolas Kovalski. The omniscience afforded to Tuvim via access to key characters' journals makes it easy to forget that he only tells us what he believes we need—and his occasional first-person commentary makes us question what is true in his/their stories. In these moments of reflection, the realization that of at least a half-dozen main narrators, none is a woman diminishes the impact of the multiple-narrator device, and the voices sound too similar in retrospect. The fantasy readers and lovers of worldbuilding epic series can find better gender balance in multiple-viewpoint stories such as Guy Gavriel Kay's Tigana or George R.R. Martin's "A Song of Ice and Fire" series. VERDICT Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers imagined vital female military leaders in a postapocalyptic world over 50 years ago; the unimpressive, ineffectual girlfriends and shrews here are a letdown and diminish the otherwise creative story and accessible philosophizing.—Nicole R. Steeves, Chicago P.L.

Library Journal

2015-01-08
In a dark future where water is scarce and disease runs rampant, a young revolutionary plots the downfall of an authoritarian government.Readers are forewarned: At more than 700 pages, this slab of dystopian fiction could swallow most epics whole—and this is still just the first entry in a planned trilogy. Where to begin? Let's start with the literary conceit. The novel posits itself as a work in translation, taken from the Slovnik nonfiction book by fictional "Aleksandr Tuvim." The real authors are its "translators," debut novelists Elliott (Comparative Literature/Univ. of Illinois; From The Crooked Timber, 2011, etc.) and Clement, who chime in with the occasional footnote. After something called "The Great Calamity," the nation has emerged as "The Federated States of America," divided by seven tribes into seven cities. In the wake of the poisoning of its largest body of water, Joshua City's people are not only thirsty, but also suffering from "nekrosis," a flesh-rotting disease. To keep his constituents in line, the malevolent Mayor Adams declares war on another faction in a plot to centralize control. There is an enormous cast, but the book primarily concerns itself with three character arcs. Nikolas Kovalski is our hero figure, a medical student who turns on the system to lead "The Underground" resistance movement as a Che Guevara-like revolutionary thinker. His best friend is Adrian Talbot, a budding young doctor who believes he can do more good inside the system, treating patients. Lastly, there's Nikolas' older brother, Marcik Kovalski, who joins the Baikal Guards but later impersonates a dead officer, Gen. Schmidt, becoming the leader of the very army that Nikolas swears to upend. The book operates on an elaborate scale but can be unwieldy in its attempts to shoehorn in political strategy, sci-fi tropes, moods drawn from bleak points in 20th-century history and the occasional romance. An epic novel of good and evil that may have more ambition than its story can support.

Kirkus Reviews