When you go through an initiation like that, there are always those things.

There are things that I will never, ever have any sort of explanation for. This was all going on inside my head, but of course, it manifested in the real world as well. It took a few months before everything fell into place. The problem was that I had to wait for that reality to adjust and reconstruct itself to everyone else’s. I had divorced myself from reality completely and accepted a new reality of my own design. I cannot deny that something very spiritual was going on when this was happening. It was the only thing I could do at the time. In addition, there are dozens upon dozens of poems and sketches that I did during this time as well. There are about sixty of them in total, only a handful of which appear in Challenger Deep. When I was going through the worst of it, I left my house, likely barefoot, but I do not remember, and went to get the supplies to make these pieces.

This artwork shows a culmination of what I was feeling when faced with the infinite of the cosmos concentrated in one finite space. Twelve pieces of Neal’s son Brendan’s haunting artwork are included throughout the novel-here’s a look at six of those pieces with insight, poems, and explanations from Brendan.Ĭhallenger Deep: Art by Brendan Shustermanīrendan Shusterman on his Challenger Deep artwork Drawing on his son’s experience with mental illness, Neal has created a captivating and powerful novel that lingers long beyond the last page. Neal Shusterman’s latest novel, Challenger Deep, comes from a very personal place.

Challenger deep by neal shusterman