Gene Curtis

Two things came together for Curtis to write this series of books. He’s retired law enforcement and too often arrived at some tragic incident, finding a young person doing what he or she could to mitigate the situation: vehicle crashes, home invasions and domestic fights, to name a few. It didn't take long for him to develop a deep respect for the heroic mindset of preteens and teenagers that he holds to this day. He grew up on his great grandfather’s farm who was a retired merchant sailor captain (wooden sailing ship days) and he told fantastic stories of adventure and heroism. Curtis loved those tales.

After Curtis retired, he started reading a lot and noticed that almost all young heroes in the stories came from broken families. From his experience, he knew this was untrue as almost all his encounters with young heroes had strong family ties. All the stories he read involving a magical world were too phony. He couldn’t find any stories with a young hero in a world of magical realism that didn’t feel fake, so he wrote one himself.

To create the magical world, he looked at all the powers of the prophets in The Bible and The Apocrypha. For example, the healing oil comes straight from the Scriptures on healing, with a little literary license of course. The idea for the bug bombs came from The Apocrypha, Book of Tobit, chapter 6. He says naming the people of the magical world was a little difficult: prophets, too religious; sorcerers or wizards, too evil; magi, hum? He wanted magical realism fiction where if the reader heard a news story about a Good Samaritan showing up out of nowhere and simply disappearing after the good deed, the reader would wonder if it might have been one of these people. Magi were just the ticket.

That decision led to the desert setting and the use of horses. Horseracing was a sport that few were using. With a few modifications, flags matches were born.

The result was a loosely faith based, wholesome suspense novel set in a world of magical realism that didn’t feel false. The result: The Seventh Mountain, a young adult fantasy, mild horror that has been described as, “Harry Potter marinated in Ender's Game, spiced with Warehouse 13, and served on a bed of Christian mysticism.”