Gabriel Hesson writes from Appalachia outward — frontier ridges, Depression-era farmhouses, and a near-future America at war with itself, all carried by the same bloodline across nearly three hundred years, until that bloodline is pulled through a fracture into a mythic world of its own. Appalachian Chronicles and The First Spark are the first two works in the Deni-Sova saga — one told from the ridge, one told from the far side of a door most people never find.
The First Spark is Book One of a planned four-book saga following Kasan Ooften of the Povathel — an arc that moves from paradise, through everything paradise can lose, and back toward paradise again, with the shape of that ending seeded quietly in these first pages.
Gabriel didn't set out to publish a novel for the market. He sat with the finished manuscript for a year before deciding it needed to be shared — on the plain conviction that it may help someone other than him. The book, its characters, and the world of Eden are written the way his own faith moves through his life: directly, and without much interest in hedging. The illustrations throughout the Deni-Sova saga are by his wife, Alejandra Hesson, who also wrote the poem that appears, word for word as she wrote it, in Chapter 13.
Deni-Sova is published under Hesson Innovations, Gabriel's imprint for the saga and the projects that have grown up around it.