Fans of Jeffrey Konvitz’s chilling book THE SENTINEL and its sequel THE GUARDIAN – as well as the 1977 film adaptation by Michael Winner – will be very pleased with the following news. Firstly, The Sentinel and The Guardian hit e-books today for the first time; cause for celebration enough for you Kindle owners. But, even more substantially, we have exclusive info regarding Konvitz’s third book in this haunting series, titled SENTINEL III – THE EXCUBITOR. And it comes straight from Mr. Konvitz himself!
Read the following press release regarding the release of the e-books, followed by an exclusive Q&A with the author!
After over thirty years, new e-book editions of The Sentinel
and, its sequel, The Guardian, are being published on digital medium worldwide
this week. The Sentinel sold over 7,000,000 mass market copies in 1975 and hit
number 2 on the New York Times’ national bestseller list, while The Guardian
sold over 2,500,000 copies four years later and also was a best-seller worldwide.
The Sentinel was produced at Universal Pictures in 1976 and one sequence in
the film was chosen by the American Film Institute to be among the scariest
horror movie sequences in modern motion picture history.
The Sentinel and The Guardian are timeless stories of good vs. evil with ever
more twisting plots and surprises that challenge the reader continually and take
the reader deeper into darkness with each turned page. Bred from the pages of
Paradise Lost, Dante’s Inferno, and texts of medieval philosophers, the two
books take the reader right to the living core of the soul.
Sentinel III’s hardcover release will cap the trilogy in 2017, while Universal is
developing a motion picture remake of The Sentinel, which was first released in 1976 in theaters nationwide.
The following is an interview with Konvitz about SENTINEL III.
Q: May we have the official title and the basic storyline of the The Sentinel 3?
Konvitz: Sentinel III – The Excubitor (Latin for “watcher”). Sentinel III – The Excubitor will be the direct sequel to The Guardian and picks up where The Guardian left off with some of the same characters appearing on its pages. Just like The Guardian was the direct successor to The Sentinel with continuing characters. One must read both books to be ready to take on Sentinel III, which will be just as terrifying, but will tackle some extremely interesting and complex issues and concepts.
Q: What fresh elements will you bring to the story via this third installment?
Konvitz: Sentinel III-The Excubitor will delve heavily into modern cosmology, which has evolved over the last forty years since The Sentinel was written. Through a Cosmology professor and priest at the California Institute of Technology, who lectures on the reconciliation of religious dogma to concepts of multiple universes, multiple dimensions, the Big Bang, Black Holes and Curved Space continuums, we begin to sense that there is more to religion and Catholicism, in particular, than imaginary stories dreamed up by acolytes, prophets and power-mongers seeking dominion over fellow men. Amid murders and a twisting plot that takes the reader back into time to digs in northern Israel, a young reporter begins to follow a sequence of bizarre murders in Los Angeles that seem to all have tentacles to an old house in South Los Angeles, where a blind and paralyzed cleric, visible in a dark, third floor window, sits and stares out into a slum amid a cocoon of nothingness.
And while this is happening, senior astronomers at NASA have discovered a puzzling and terrifying double phenomena. There is an aggregation of comets, whose trajectory is traced back to the Black Hole at the center of the Milky Way, and it is headed to earth, while there is bizarre shower of super high energy particles headed to earth from the other direction as well, the NASA scientists, along with university colleagues, theorizing that the particles were generated by the most powerful supernova explosion in recorded history. And so it continues.
Q: Will this 3rd book lead to a fourth installment or is this the end of the story for
you?
Konvitz: Book III will take the reader back to the start of Book I and only by reading The Sentinel and The Guardian will a reader know what that cryptic concept means. So, Sentinel III will no doubt be the end of the journey.
Many thanks to Jeffrey for this information. To order The Sentinel ebook, go HERE; head HERE for The Guardian.