BETWEEN TWO A.M. AND DAWN: A Novel by Fred Welden
General Info
projected to run approximately 90,000 words.abandoned at something like 50,000 words.
Since the novel is only half completed at the time of this writing, the following synopsis may turn out to be inaccurate. However, this is what I have outlined, and most of the anchoring plot points occur in portions that are already written.
Synopsis
The book consists of first-person recollections of recent events, recorded during a series of bouts of insomnia. The narrator is Eric Madden, a man in his thirties with no strong ambitions, who subsists by renovating New Orleans apartments for his mother to rent or resell. When his friend Bobby McKenna complains that he can't get a gallery showing for his paintings, Eric volunteers to convert one of the apartments he is working on into an ad-hoc gallery and stage an opening.A critic for a local weekly arts magazine single-handedly turns the opening into a greater success than either Eric or Bobby had expected, and Eric finds himself the proprietor of a thriving gallery. In time he falls in love with the critic, Millie Cyrosanti. While he is pursuing an affair with her a series of incidents occurs to ruin business at the gallery, and he discovers that the person behind them and Bobby's previous difficulties is Millie's stepmother, a local arts maven. In effect, Millie and her stepmother have been using the gallery as a pawn in a fight for dominance, and Eric has been caught in the middle. Discovering that his recent successes and failures are only the result of the manipulations of others brings home to him his own aimlessness, and in his self-doubt he finds himself strangely drawn to the character of Sampson, the stepmother's lover.
Sampson calls himself a zombie, and insists that Eric has an unrealized zombie nature as well. When Eric runs away from New Orleans to the Gulf Coast, it is Sampson who follows and retrieves him, and educates him in the zombie way of acceptance. In the end, by accepting his zombie nature, Eric discovers an artistic calling of his own as a designer of bizarre interior architecture and sets out to make a new life with Millie.