Death by Revelation: selected by Kirkus Indie editors to be featured in the January 1, 2017 issue of Kirkus Reviews

There can be no question: the psychological dangers through which earlier generations were guided by the symbols and spiritual exercises of their mythological and religious inheritance, we today…must face alone…This is our problem as modern, “enlightened” individuals, for whom all gods and devils have been rationalized out of existence.
C.G Jung

Even now, I remember, the last normal day of my life, an overcast June morning in Los Angeles, 1957.

I liked to swim before breakfast and that morning, went in early, at around 7:00. It was quiet, except for the doves calling and the plashing of the water against the sides of the pool as I swam. The two huge bougainvilleas—purple and orange—were especially beautiful this morning, blazing against a white sky. From down below, at the bottom of the garden, came the sound of dishes being set out for breakfast on the patio.
Death by Revelation

 *****

 The day was gray enough, but the afternoon light still lingered, and it enabled me, on crossing the threshold, not only to recognize on a chair near the wide window, then closed, the articles I wanted, but to become aware of a person on the other side of the window and looking straight in.
The Turn of the Screw.

I thought of the deserted dead man’s house with its For Sale sign on the sloping front lawn. I dressed, put on my parka and boots, and quietly let myself out through the front door. The street was deserted except for the bus idling at the corner. The driver was pulling away from the stop, but he opened the door when he saw me, and I climbed aboard. It was 1:30 AM.

I got off at 33^rd Avenue and headed towards the house that drew me to it. There were the bins, just as before, and some debris bags—large black plastic ones—that had been brought to the curb after my earlier visit that day. From these I took more papers, all that I could carry in my pack. They were an assortment, some from each of the bags. But this was not enough. I climbed the cement steps and crossed the sodden lawn. Was anyone watching as I, a trespasser, prowled the deserted property? I stood in the mud of the flower bed bordering the front of the house and looked through the window into a dark living room. It was empty except for a ladder, drop cloths, cans of paint, and shadows.

What had I expected? Not this. In the deserted interior, I saw a life.
Death by Revelation

*****

…and it was only when Wormold had lain down that he remembered the postcard to Dr. Hasselbacher was still on the sergeant’s desk. It seemed to him to have no importance; he could always send another in the morning. How long it takes to realise in one’s life the intricate patterns in which everything–even a picture postcard–can form a part, and the rashness of dismissing anything as unimportant.
Our Man in Havana

I pulled out the clipping, black blot on one side, fragment of map on the other showing the area around a city called Cimcit, “ibu” on what could have been a masthead line. At the bottom of the map, somewhat to the southwest, an arrow pointed to an incomplete name: hkent. What was it about this pouch, or its contents, that could cause such a violent, spasmodic reaction—the convulsive coughing and bloodied sleeve, the horribly inflamed face and eyes, the fight to breathe?
Death by Revelation

*****

By the late 1800s, five cemeteries lay in northwestern San Francisco–the Richmond District: Laurel Hill, Calvary, Masonic, Odd Fellows, and, at the eastern end of Laurel Hill Cemetery, the Chinese Cemetery. In 1872, remains resting in this cemetery were exhumed and reburied in City Cemetery, at Land’s End. Then, in 1909, the city hired workers to remove the graves and remains from City Cemetery so that the land could become a park. The workers removed the gravestones and cemetery markers, but left many bodies where they lay. Today, Lincoln Park Golf Course lies atop the old cemetery.
Lorri Ungaretti, San Francisco’s Richmond District.

More than half of San Francisco, from Ocean Beach to the Bay was once covered by sand dunes. An 1857 geological report noted that the area of dunes “has the aspect and character of a desert.” Sand such as that which today regularly blows across the Great Highway along Ocean Beach once lay more than 100 feet deep east of Golden Gate Park. Some dunes were more than 60 feet high. Strong winds blew sand over San Francisco’s hills and caused sand to drift as far east as the Bay…Even today, construction uncovers extensive sand fields.
Doris Sloane. Geology of the San Francisco Bay Region

At the crest of the hill, he meets an even sharper, colder wind. He passes the graveyards. The dead will not harm him.

Now there are dunes. The terrain is unfamiliar. He has never before traveled so far to the west. Occasionally, a light glimmers in the darkness. Shacks are scattered about in the dunes. A co-worker has told him that California Street leads to the sea, but none of those whom he asked knew the location of the Asylum; few even knew of its existence.

He stops and peers into the black distance at what seem to be tiny and faint pinpoints of light, starts towards them, and eventually arrives at a large brick structure on a high bluff overlooking the sea. Its small windows are barred and its double doors are made of heavy metal. An iron bell hangs beside them.
Death by Revelation.

*****

 “Dear, dear! How queer everything is today! And yesterday things went on just as usual. I wonder if I’ve been changed in the night? Let me think: was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I’m not the same, the next question is, Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle.”
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

In the near white-out, a tall, white building on Outer Broadway seemed to have come free of its foundation and to be adrift, its neighbors having nearly receded from view in the ground-level cloud mass.

In the suave elegance of the lobby, two sea deities lounged, one in each of the lower corners of a mural in muted blues and violets. They gazed across a scene of strange vacancy, a dreamlike San Francisco Bay without ships. And as in dreams, in which one can move without conscious volition from place to place, so the eye of the viewer drifted without satisfaction, rejecting the vacancy at the center of the scene, drawn to the figures at the periphery, then following their trancelike gaze back to the center, and so on.

The brass faced doors of the elevator opened and closed almost soundlessly. I got off at the top floor. Down the hall, I pushed a button set discreetly in the wall and waited.
Death by Revelation

*****

He lifted the hangings from the wall, uncovering the second door: this, too, he opened. In a room without a window there burnt a fire, guarded by a high and strong fender, and a lamp suspended from the ceiling by a chain. In the deep shade, at the further end of the room, a figure ran backwards and forwards.
Jane Eyre.

With the black outside turning gray, at last falling asleep, I remembered something I’d once read about the Middle Ages: that in those times, suicides were buried at crossroads. Having died in a state of sin, they were ineligible for burial in consecrated ground. Whatever suffering had led them, deprived of hope and in defiance of the teachings of their Church, to forfeit life and God was to extend without termination after death. At the crossroads, the soul was to be suspended forever in a state of isolation, without mobility allowed—however much crossroads invite movement in one direction or another—with the configuration of the roads a grim parody of the Cross, symbol of mercy, up to a point.
Death by Revelation

*****

The Mole fell backward on the snow from sheer surprise and delight. “Rat!” he cried in penitence, “you’re a wonder! A real wonder, that’s what you are. I see it all now! You argued it out, step by step, in that wise head of yours, from the very moment that I fell and cut my shin, and you looked at the cut and at once your majestic mind said to itself, ‘Door-scraper!’ And then you turned to and found the very door scraper that done it! Did you stop there? No. Some people would have been quite satisfied; but not you. Your intellect went right on working. ‘Let me only just find a door-mat,’ says you to yourself, ‘and my theory is proved! And of course you found your door-mat.”
The Wind in the Willows.

Outside, the morning had taken on that intense clarity that sometimes precedes and usually follows rain. The houses and green-black Monterey pines and cypresses, the hills to the north and south, Golden Gate Park, and the windmills stood out in exquisitely sharp detail.

Well, I had parted with $1,500 because of a vague trail of evidence leading to an old house whose connection to my cousin’s death could scarcely be called even tenuous. Quite simply, I was no longer responsible for myself.
Death by Revelation

*****

Surely all art is the result of having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, to where no one can go any further.
Rainer Maria Rilke

I felt again that I was an artist—a set designer, but without a set. Always in other peoples’ homes, I had no opportunity to create a set for my own life. Now, in the studio apartment overlooking the Pacific, I would have that opportunity. The light there was very good—direct from the west in the afternoon, indirect from the north throughout the day. The blues, grays, and violets of the seascape and the greens of the open spaces surrounding the house—not to mention the sunset roses, coppers, and golds—would be all the color I’d need. The interior would be white, all white.
Death by Revelation

Buy Death by Revelation @ Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Sutro Heights, Emptied Crypts at Laurel Hill Cemetery, and Sea Cliff Street: historic photos courtesy of the San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library