Sparrow Hall is a diehard New Yorker — and, unlike many who adopt that moniker, he has made a life out of embracing the state in its entirety.
He’s run a microblog touting hidden gems such as the stretch of Route 5 between Amsterdam and Little Falls, soft launched his debut novel by personally transporting signed copies out to his hometown haunts and Photoshopped himself into an antiquated Abbott’s advertisement for fun on social media. He even wrote some of his novel, a decade-plus labor of love and research, at Pearson’s, a coffee shop in the Park Avenue neighborhood of Rochester.
Hall, who spent part of his childhood in Penfield and Brockport, spins a yarn in his psychic thriller, “The Invisible Eye,” which ping-pongs protagonist Catherine between New York City and various places upstate as she discovers the secrets behind her ability to see people’s past lives. This geographical tie is carefully crafted from a lifetime of looking beyond the veil of his childhood towns.
“I saw that as a child in Amsterdam, by the early ’80s, factories were, to the most part, abandoned,” Hall said. “It’s like walking through a kingdom of the dead. You’re walking around ghosts, and as I grew up and I was seeing these other cities in towns going through this post-industrial bleakness and not being reimagined, I always kind of carried in my heart, ‘I think people will rediscover how magical these places are.’”
This delight in hidden magic was a perfect backdrop for Hall’s next adventure, where he stumbled into an anthropology class taught by Phillips Stevens Jr., a scholar of the supernatural, in a singular semester at SUNY Buffalo.
“It was just a strange twist of fate,” Hall said. “It shifted something in me, where it’s almost like you think you’re going to see one movie and then it’s a completely different thing.”
He transferred to Bennington College and worked in New York City as a creative director and copywriter, but that class sparked a simmering interest in the metaphysical, which Hall used to fuel over a decade of research for “The Invisible Eye.” For example, to create Catherine, Hall read autobiographies of Buffalo psychic Terry Iacuzzo and Woodstock medium Suzan Saxman.
Additionally, Hall’s work as a DJ, which started in Buffalo, manifests in a soundscape playlist — including Rochester’s own Joywave — to accompany the book.
The resulting multimedia experience dares readers to step outside the mundane and embrace the enchanting allure of New York. Through Hall’s love letter of a story, he hopes that others can experience the same magic he’s felt his whole life.
“When you go to these things, like a novel showcasing all of these different backdrops in New York State, maybe it makes you say, ‘I want to go on a road trip. I kind of want to go there,” he said. “And I’m reconnecting with all the people and all the places that are meaningful to me.”
“The Invisible Eye” is available for purchase through Amazon and various Barnes & Noble locations. Signed copies are available at Lift Bridge Book Shop, Pearson’s Market and Café, Book Culture Pittsford and Ampersand Books.
