surrealism Archives

A Short Excerpt from Jezebel’s Island: A Psychological and Mystery Thriller Coming in July at Literary Revelations

The asphalt road sloped down toward the ocean, bordered by towering palm trees and white, two- to three-story buildings. Anastasia walked, wondering how many more times in her life she would come here. She had only seen this street from the point where it intersected with the bustling lanes of Grand Avenue, never imagining that her own footsteps would one day echo on these narrow, sunburned sidewalks.

She looked around. Roses choked terraces; the palm trees’ leaves hung over the pavement like huge, ragged wings. Here, according to Lady Swattley, within one of these silent homes must once have lived the young scientist with whom Jezebel had been in love.

She came to a dead halt in front of a weathered three-story building. It was the tallest structure on Robbia Street. She did not know why she had stopped there. Her instinct told her that Jezebel had spent years of her youth climbing the stairs in that house. Closed blinds covered every window. The yard was full of unkempt flowers. Anastasia studied the white walls, cracked by time. Did these cracks still hold the echoes of Jezebel’s sighs, echoes of Jezebel’s voice during her afternoons of love?

She thought she heard a voice. The voice of a woman. She couldn’t understand anything until another masculine voice said:

— Death.

Anastasia pressed her palms against her temples. The street was entirely empty. A few seconds later, a sleek yellow car glided past her and turned onto Grand Avenue. The driver waved at her.

She heard Jezebel’s words:

— This City is populated by empty souls who flatter themselves into believing they have authentic hearts in their chests. What they classify as joy is nothing more than a temporary chemical exhilaration. They are joyous, Anastasia my dear, but their bliss is delusional.

Was Jezebel correct? Were humans in this City intoxicated by commercial advertisements inviting them to purchase happiness under the pretext of prolonging their expiration dates?

A sound startled her from the direction of the house. She turned, and there, perched atop the roof, sat two white swans, their wings beating a frantic, rhythmic tattoo against the sky.

A Note by the R. M.

Gabriela Marie Milton’s Jezebel’s Island utilizes a deeply atmospheric, fractured, and symbolist narrative style that shares distinct genetic markers with the surrealist prose of Gabriel García Márquez and the psychological, maze-like prose of Jorge Luis Borges. Milton consciously rejects a traditional linear trajectory, constructing her dystopian thriller through fragmented cinematic flashes, abrupt transitions, and heavy thematic loops where “the beginning is the end”. This structural ambiguity and reliance on surreal motifs—such as ghostly swans, shifting eye colors, and uncanny character mirrors—evokes the magical realism of García Márquez, while her focus on labyrinthine setups, philosophical text-within-a-text revelations, and characters seeking their own existential identity heavily mirrors the cerebral, puzzle-box literature of Borges. However, while those masters often maintain a certain mythic or detached distance, Milton infuses her style with the visceral, modern anxiety of a psychological thriller, using sensory disorientation (such as headaches, cold dread, and the contrasting “plasticine” superficiality of the City) to make the reader an active, trapped co-investigator in her surreal maze.

Thank you for reading!

Gabriela Marie Milton,
Author and Founder of Literary Revelations
Woman of the Month (May, 2026), at P.O.W.E.R Magazine
One of the 60th Women’s Entrepreneurs to Watch for in 2026, New York Weekly