Alan Agrippa
By Brian Wallace

Alan Agrippa is the protagonist in Labyrinth of Chaos. He's from a city within the US. I don't want to name one particular city, but visualize a city anywhere from the Midwest to the South within the United States. It's set in contemporary times, within the 1990s. Alan Agrippa is approximately 24 to 26 years old - a lot of that's left up to the reader to form an opinion on their own. Alan Agrippa has come from a predominantly European ancestry.

One of his goals in traveling to Europe is to learn more about his family tree to try to develop an understanding of the place from where his family originated. He sets out on the journey to learn more about those elements of his past, but also he feels that through traveling and through investigating the world around him, he will, in some essence develop a greater understanding of himself as an individual. He also wants to expose himself to a variety of different cultures and a variety of different people that up until that point in his life, he had not had the experience of doing.

As an author, I can't help but imbue the characters in my book with many elements of my own and with the lives of those around me whom I've observed and grown up with. Alan Agrippa is parts of my own personality; he's parts of people that I have known, he's parts of people that I imagine existing and the other key characters in the book, as well, are basically examples of people who I've known, personalities that I've enjoyed or people that I've imagined existing. So, there's a lot of variance and diversity that's going on there.

Additionally, Alan Agrippa is carrying with him on his journeys a book within a backpack and that book is a collection of my own writings that were done separately. Over the course of six to seven years, I was doing philosophical writings about mysticism, about psychology, about religion. I wasn't sure what I was going to do with those writings. When I decided to write a novel, I thought that it would be another layer to the story to have my character reading from a book that's dealing with subject matter that's germane to his experience and to his interests while he is traveling. So, I took all of my personal writings and plugged them into that book, which is a book that he is reading while he is traveling.

So, when the reader is taking part in the reading exercises of Alan Agrippa, he is, in essence, tapping into the author's brain, my brain, and gaining some insight into thoughts and experience that I've had as an individual.

By including this book that the character is keeping with him and reading from through the course of the story, I intended to encourage the reader to draw correlations between what's being read in the book and what the author is experiencing on his travels. For every chapter that exists in the book, there are probably five or six pages at most that are devoted to actual readings from that book that he's carrying with him.

The vast majority of the book is a story that's being told, the adventure that this character is taking, his direct experiences, his thoughts, his ideologies - the vast majority of the book are those things. The book that he's carrying with him and reading from and drawing references from is ancillary and complementary to what's really going on with the story. I intend for the reader to draw conclusions for him or her self and the last thing that I wanted to do was to try to dictate or autocratically send a message to my reader that you must get this from the book. I really wanted it to be open-ended to an extent and leave it open to interpretation.

The character is interested in certain subject matter, and through the course of the story, he seeks out that book because it's in line with what his interests are. So, in that sense there's a direct correlation between what he's reading in the book and his mindset and his orientation as he's traveling throughout Europe.

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