About

Antumbra Press

Antumbra Press is the independent imprint of author Berkley Starks. Its name comes from astronomy — the antumbra is the bright outer ring of an eclipse, the place where the obscuring body no longer fully covers the light behind it. The imprint exists to publish Heirs of the Eclipse and the books that follow it.

Berkley Starks

Berkley Starks lives in a small town near Yellowstone with his wife, four kids, and three cats. By day he's a Linux systems administrator. By night, when he isn't reading, playing French horn, or refusing to be defeated by a particularly stubborn line of prose, he writes adult dark fantasy.

Heirs of the Eclipse is his first published series. It began, as many things do, with a single Dungeons & Dragons character. Her backstory wouldn't stop expanding. The expansions wouldn't stop demanding more context. The context kept asking for its own backstory. By the time he could see the shape of the world she lived in (three institutions, three children, three thousand years of cosmic preparation), he understood that the character had outgrown her game and would need a series of her own.

The result owes a particular debt to two writers. Terry Goodkind taught him that prophecy is only meaningful when the people in it can refuse what's prophesied, and that the long arc of an epic series is held together by the cost of the choices its characters make. Robin Hobb taught him that breaking a reader's heart, when done well, is one of the most honest things a writer can do, and that the privilege of asking readers for their attention requires meeting that attention with stakes that earn it.

What the Blood Remembers: Three Cages is the first volume of Heirs of the Eclipse. It is, ultimately, a book about the cages we build for ourselves and the cages built around us, and about the long work of finding the light at the end of them. He has framework files for several other series sitting in drawers; they will come, eventually, in their own time.