Amazon Link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01LWCT1K4 

What “Abode of the Dead” is About:
Book Description:
Untold millennia ago, the gods abandoned humanity and the sun turned from a hot, life-giving yellow to a cold blue-white. The warm land of Ekdu transformed from a lush paradise into a cold wasteland where humanity has to scratch out a meagre living from the flinty, constantly frozen soil.

Alia is a peasant girl from a tiny, horrendously poor village sold to the queen’s guards by her father. She and four other girls are brought to the Abode of the Dead, a vast necropolis located inside a mountain and sealed away from the rest of the world with solid iron doors. She fears that she might end up as a sacrifice for a terrible monster kept in the maze-like Abode by the Queen of Ekdu, who occasionally has her soldiers enter the Abode to harvest a gem of immortality which grows in the beast’s body.

Will Alia or any of the girls survive in the Abode? Will the monster eat their hearts as they fear it might?

BACKGROUND:
 When Abode of the Dead was written, I realized that there were no real women in romance. I mean, where are all the ladies who looked “round” and had no “thigh gaps”.

I have been to villages in underdeveloped areas on this planet and to be honest, few ladies in their natural state are slim with non visible thigh gaps… Yes, I went to a place where it was possible to see naked people bathing in a river. So I had a very good view… of what is the standard sans modern notions of beauty and slimness. The truth is, most women are NORMAL standard and many Singaporean women are actually quite flat. (yes people, you are all FLAT… sorry ladies, no fats = no boobs)

Rare are the ladies who are “Booblicious” and also 36-24-36 in terms of statistics.

Having a boob people can see = having noticeable fat… This also means having a tummy and/or round hips. Yes, tummies and round hips are common in an “au naturel” society… not influenced by so-called “Americanized” standard of beauty. Imagine a society where no one has ever seen a single edition of “Cosmo”or “Vogue” or “Her World”… that was where I went. And no one has ever seen a single copy of “50 Shades of…” and men do not get stressed about “size”, where most people work in the rice fields and have  natural physiques and no one goes to the “gym”.

Most men having worked hard in non-mechanized farming are actually decent in terms of musculature and size. So no one ever worries about “chicken legs” or being so skinny that the girlfriend has more fat than he has. There is no worry about some “Mr Grey” being more a man than he is. He is a man because he is healthy, has land and can grow rice to feed his family. And that is what matters. That he is capable of doing all the stuff expected of him, can protect his family and feed everyone.

I wanted a romance where ordinary people fall in love where imperfect people bunder about the whole courtship game and somehow fall in love all the same. I mean a world where a normal girl blunders into situation where she has to confront marriage or face the realities of life as an unmarried spinster, a difficult reality in a lot of non-modern societies.

I mean, who wants a story about perfect people who are nothing like you?

It is with this in mind that I wrote Abode of the Dead. Also, I grew up in an environment where worshipping your dead relatives was normal. I am just lucky we do not keep grandma at home like they do on the island of Sulawesi among the Toraja tribespeople.  Yes, the “walking dead” are a reality among the people there. I mean, if ur grandma or grandpa is dressed and sitting in a chair at home, and  he/she is dead… it certainly brings home the reality of what happens when we all die. I do think that for the Toraja the “walking dead” refer more to the spirits of dead ancestors rather than actual walking corpses.

I am just lucky in that I was educated in the various means of corpse preservation since a young age… through many books of course and also having visited many museums and funeral parlours to see how it is done or results of it being done. My family are fairly scientific and they never hid the reality of death from me.

I did not visit Sulawesi but another nearby place with similar culture.

I realized that the simplicity of the environment allowed people to appreciate each other without being confused by the complexities of the modern world. Also, people are more forgiving of imperfections and focus on the important things. Like personality and whether they (the couple) can get along.