'Warm Moonlight'

 

I'd like to tell you a story', an old woman says to her beloved great-granddaughter - and thereby hangs a tale . . . .  and what a tale . . . 

It's a story of adventure and rescue, redemption and renewal, with just a tinge of spirituality, imbued throughout with a compelling warmth and nostalgia. Written in the great storytelling tradition, 'Warm Moonlight' has all the intensity of a got-to-hear-how-it-ends campfire yarn, but with a decidedly adult sophistication and sensibility. The ending is unique and satisfying, but leaves the audience, like one of the characters in the story, wondering - how much of it was true? How much invented? Can such things be? Maybe it's a ghost story or . . . . maybe it isn't.

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'Warm Moonlight' is a framed story, that is, a tale told by one person to another. I'd like to say more about the frame than I could in the blurb without being guilty of overlength. An older woman, a gifted authoress, knows her beloved great granddaughter is in some distress. Ostensibly to pass the time on a rainy Saturday, she spins a thrilling tale of her own youth. Quite apart from the quality of the yarn, its creation is a gesture of love, a reaching out to someone for whom she cares quite a bit. Although the inner story has the ambiguity necessary to make a story with a mild spiritual element effective, there is nothing at all ambiguous about the resolution in the frame. The girl understands what her 'granny's' gesture means. She leaves the next day, not with her problems solved - that would be absurd - but with renewed confidence that she can cope with them. The frame gives the novella a warmth and depth of feeling unusual in a short work. That's where the actual emotional 'oomph' of the work resides. 

For what it's worth, I consider this a much stronger story than 'The Old Soul' - it has considerably more emotional resonance. (It's also almost twice as long, with a few more twists. Numbers sometimes count!) It has the same sort of spiritual tinge as 'The Old Soul', not conventionally religious as such, but the sense that there just may be a little more to this human reality of ours than bricks and mortar and things that can be counted on your fingers. The place of the scientific background in 'The Old Soul' is taken up here by a great deal of period detail. You'll see what I mean if you read the thing.

A century ago, there used to be a huge market for pieces of this type - for example, the publication 'The Strand' in England, where Sherlock Holmes made his debut, or 'The Saturday Evening Post' in the United States, which I loved as a kid. The Amazon Kindle Singles program seems to me to be resurrecting that market, an enormously exciting prospect. So enjoy.  

I do hope that some of the readers who have enjoyed this story will take a chance on 'Thursday's Child', the novel that is the subject of this blog. That book has been snakebit since the the day I finished it. Not that the book is bad - quite the contrary. As paradoxical as this may seem, it's alost too good for its's own good. It was represented, by the only agent who read it,  and was in fact accepted editorially at a major publishing house. But the marketing experts at the house eventually turned it down. The reason was that 'Thursday's Child' is a conscious attempt to overlay a conventional Harlequin-type romance with a novel of ideas. The result was an exuberant, adventurous read, with an epic feel, made out of the ordinary materials of urban life, brimming with inteesting characters and sexy as hell. Part of the fun is it does touch all of the bases of those silly, but rather entertaining, conventional romances. Throughout, it all, you'll find the same constant play of ideas and factual nuance that you enjoyed in the short story - and you'll find a far more serious subtext in play than in the regular form. 'Thursday's Child' has a sweep and an epic scope that the books on the paperback rack completely lack. It's a huge, major novel. 

Which is exactly why the book is in a way too good for its own good. It falls into multiple genres - elements of business thriller, ordinary mystery, more than a hint of gothic romance, and tinged throughout with the Shakesperean mysticism to the effect that there may be more to this existence than philosophers can say, The marketing committee that ultimately rejected it felt that the complexities of the book were much more than the average romance reader wanted or would accept. In retrospect, I'm not so sure the marketeers weren't right - as to that market. But both my agent and I felt they ignored the much larger market, of people who are drawn to an dense intricate plot with a love relationship at the center. It's a formula that has been working pretty well for a millenium or so. The soup does overflow the bowl to some extent - but the result is what I think is a very good read, 'a sprawling, yet tightly organized' narrative that invites you into its own world. (I am loosely quoting the unsolicited letter I received from the copyrighter, set forth elsewhere on this blog. He found an entirely different book than the slight thing he expected, far more interesting and impressive, and was kind enough to write me and say so.)

Success in the form of fame or money doesn't mean much to me these days. But I always thought that 'Thursday's Child' deserved a decent audience. That audience is likely made up of readers who liked these two stories, which certainly aren't romances, but similar in the lively play of ideas. So I hope you'll give the novel a chance. You may make a discovery - a book you can lose yourself in, which is a rare thing these days.

Thanks for visiting.