Kirjahaku

From a startling new voice in American fiction comes a dark, powerful novel about a tragic city and its inhabitants over the course of one Halloween weekend. Set in a decaying Midwestern urban landscape, with its goings-on and entire atmosphere dominated and charged by one Jesuit prep school and its students, parents, faculty, and alumni, THE NATURAL ORDER OF THINGS is a window into the human condition. From the opening chapter and its story of the doomed quarterback, Frank McSweeney, aka The Minotaur, for whom prayers prove not enough, to the end, wherein the school's former headmaster is betrayed by his peers in the worst way possible, we see people and their oddness and ambitions laid out bare before us.

For years Normandy Falls has been haunted by its strange history and aggrieved spirits said to roam its graveyards. Despite warnings, Edmund Campion is determined to move there to pursue a graduate degree. One night Edmund stumbles upon the body of Emily Ryan drowned in her family pool. Was it suicide, Edmund wonders, or murder? Elsewhere, a low-level criminal named The Gonk takes over a remote cottage, complete with a burial ground and moonshine still, and devises plans for both; Xavier D'Avignon, the eccentric chef of a failing French restaurant, supplies customers with a hallucinogenic cocktail he makes in his kitchen; and Colette Collins, an elderly local artist of the surreal, attends a New Year's Eve retrospective that is destined to set the whole town on fire.

Comprising three interlinked novellas,Bridge of Dreams: A Speculative Triptych?centers around a young woman who embarks upon a spiritual quest over the span of three different lifetimes. In Gwendolyn Greene and the Moondog Coronation Ball of 1957, the Soviets are preparing to launch a dog into orbit. The Americans, in an attempt to stay competitive in the space race, select a remarkably intelligent dog owned by a 14-year-old girl from rural Ohio. But only Gwendolyn can explain the mystery behind her beloved canine?s extraordinary gifts. Hilda Whitby and the Heavenly Light of 1857, takes place in an Ohio frontier town and concerns the trials and tribulations of a brilliant female chemist who has just lost her son to a devastating explosion. Wanted for questioning by authorities, Hilda travels along the Erie Canal, meeting an assortment of curious characters until one fateful night when she faces a strange destiny inside a cave. In IMPETUS 13 and the Constitutional Crisis of 2057, a timid college student and an assertive professor of creative writing set out on a road trip only to discover what appears to be a flying saucer stranded deep in a remote canyon.