Freefantasy (a.k.a. Phantasy, Psychfantasy) is a new genre of literature which appears with the release of The Whisplins Trilogy. It’s a genre of fantasy that borrows from the tradition of fantasy fiction just as heavily as from cinema, music, comics, as well as other genres entirely. It belongs to the New Wave of Geekery, Nerdism and Cosplayers just as much as it’s for a wider audience of literature and music fans elsewhere. It borrows from philosophy, the counterculture, surrealism, and adopts the “post-whatever” view on media. It’s a new genre which doesn’t necessarily follow all the dogmatic rules of prior fantasy fiction; it’ll often bend or break the rules entirely, or step out of the world of fantasy for a moment within its own pages to get perspective. It’s influenced by the movies, psychedelia, science-fiction— bringing it all into a mossy phantasmal dreamland.

Some of the films which influenced the creation of the genre were Labyrinth, The Neverending Story, The Princess Bride as well as the more cerebral writing of Alan Moore, the gore and darkness of Grimmtales, and the fantasy landscapes of music like Led Zepplin and the entire psych-folk scene— all much moreso than populist films like The Lord of the Rings influenced it, for example. Though I liked the first one a lot.

Freefantasy is also less rigid in its use of language: it doesn’t necessarily try to speak in simple tiny words so that everyone understands. Like your favorite college professor, it teaches to the top of the classroom, but keeps you with it, talking to readers in a sort of heteroglossia— a mixing of languages. The Freefantasy voice might be written in a long streaming torrent of Harry Potterish Britishisms one moment, then entirely switch gear into parental advisory explicit lyrics-mode next up. Some might think it’s a poetic form.

William Faulkner once chastised Ernest Hemingway for not being daring enough in his use of language. Freefantasy fully embraces that daringness of spirit that Faulkner demaded, and matches it with its equally daring content which might be by turns anarchistic, and at others sublime and illuminating as the action unfolds.

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Note:

The Whisplins Trilogy is available for free download on 11/23/12-11/24/12 right here http://tinyurl.com/bdzhgxz