If you like wizards, robots, monsters, quest-based adventure, mysterious prophecies, insatiable revenge plots, and a hero determined to overcome an oppressive regime, Oceano author and musician Kevin Carver has written a book just for you. The Forbidden Parallel follows Jah’ri, who when the story opens is preparing for a test of stamina against an ancient adversary. If he survives, he’ll go from being a lowly Nail to becoming Hammer Jah’ri in the service of King Kulloh-Sor’s army.
Set on the mountainous planet Arou, the world is composed of Parallels (think segregated districts within an oppressive caste system, with physically higher parallels more affluent than lower). The book, published by Portland’s Provender Press, is the first in a planned trilogy, and what really sets it apart is that Carver has also recorded a soundtrack meant to complement his story.
Carver mentions books such as Frank Herbert’s Dune, Adrian Tchaikovsky’s City of Last Chances, George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones, and the Old English poem Beowulf among touchstones, but I also see shades of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars and Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian. In the prologue and chapter 1 made available to me, I found a fully realized world and a propulsive story that I hope to finish after the book is officially released on May 24.
Carver has previously published a nonfiction book and articles under the name Kevin Carr, including the e-book, The Musicians Guide to Digital Marketing, which New Times wrote about in 2022, but fiction was always on his horizon.
“It’s always been the dream,” Carver explained. “I tend to view everything else as a step towards releasing fiction. Through all the years of writing, doing journalism and freelance work and corporate writing and everything, I was was chipping away at it. It feels unreal, to be honest. I’m supposed to be holding a book in my hands in a few weeks, so I won’t believe it till I see it.”
Carver studied creative writing in college and has written unpublished fictional short stories, but this will be his first published novel.
“I think I got stalled for a number of years, and some of it was life, you know, kids, marriage, family, work,” he explained. “You graduate from college, and you think you’re going to write the next literary masterpiece. I love the classics. I love Steinbeck and Shakespeare and all those guys, and so I think I tried too hard to write the next Great American Novel. What really unlocked it for me was letting go and being like, you know what? I love robots and wizards, so I’m gonna write a book about robots and wizards and monsters and kind of cut loose, and then the whole thing just spilled out of me.”
After it “spilled out,” it took a friend to reveal to Carver that the book, at heart, was a fantasy novel.
“I was actually under the impression that I was writing more of a classic science fiction story,” he laughed, “and then I got done and a friend read it said, ‘You know, you wrote a fantasy novel.’ And I said, ‘Oh!?!’ Only because I didn’t really set out to do it. I’m a bit of a Beowulf nerd, and so the original vision was to write my own version of Beowulf, a sci-fi take on Beowulf. It just ended up somewhere so completely different, and that’s part of the fun of writing, you know?”
Carver came up with a lot of interesting names for his imagined world: Arou, the Sea of Cashmu, Hammer Jah’ri, the Kingdom of Kulloh-sor. Is there a method to these words or are they just things that sounded and looked cool?
“I think this is probably the nerdy stuff that every writer likes to talk about,” he laughed. “It’s a little bit different every time. Some names are variations of people I know, some are directly stolen from people I know with their permission. I’ve worked at a global tech company, and I get to travel a little bit, and so I’ve met people from all over the world, and I’ll reach out to them a little bit later and be like, ‘Do you mind if I use your name?'”
It was important to Carver that speaking the names aloud sounded like real possible names.
“It has to have a certain cadence to it, I think. You read some books where it might have looked good on paper, but when you say it out loud, it’s clunky. The cadence is really important,” he explained. “The one Easter egg I’ll tell you about is Cashmu, a reference to the Johnny Cash Museum. I basically couldn’t settle on a word. And I tried many, many different words and nothing really fit. I have this little photo of me at the Johnny Cash Museum in my office, and it’s blocked by something, so all I saw were the words ‘Cash’ and ‘Mu,’ so I just said, oh shit, you know, that’s it. Cashmu. So sometimes it’s a simple as that.”
Carver’s already written the second book of the trilogy and the third is outlined. Along with Jah’ri, there are three other main characters that will follow through the story. Like A Game of Thrones, it’s told from multiple points of view that shift from one character’s to another’s, chapter by chapter.
“Eventually all these characters will find their way to each other,” Carver explained of the plot. “For me, the book is about convergence, about things coming together, people coming together. I’d say the thesis of the book is that power is a disease, and it’s basically something that spreads throughout the universe, and it corrupts man. And so how do we fix that? Power tends to try to separate people, and convergence brings people together, and that’s the goal.”
His plan is to eventually release the accompany online soundtrack on vinyl and have an album release concert, but the two formats don’t need to be experienced together.
“I think they’re different,” Carver explained. “I do think of them as siblings, really. They’re from the same family, but they’re both individuals and they’re different people. And I think they can be enjoyed separately, you know?
“I think some people will find the novel and never listen to the music, and some might listen to the music and never read the novel. And that’s OK. Ultimately, I think one enriches the other. That’s really the goal, to basically create something that almost feels interdimensional.” Δ
Contact Arts Editor Glen Starkey at gstarkey@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in Summer Guide 2025.