Desolation Ghosts is a 65,000-word adult literary fiction novel in the vein of The Human Stain. It is set in North Cascades National Park and is about a missing traumatized female veteran with alcohol and relationship addictions who changes her mind about killing herself, but then falls off a mountain and must survive in the wilderness while park rangers battle over how much effort should be spent to locate her. The story takes place during the Covid-19 pandemic and the beginning of law enforcement reforms following the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. This book will appeal to readers who are interested in national parks, outdoor recreation, the Pacific Northwest, and the controversial issue of how emergency services treat people with mental health challenges. It includes exciting stories, based on real-life events, about using rock climbing and short-haul helicopter techniques to rescue a pack string mule who fell off a trail and a mountain climber who fell off a crag, a shoot-out and its impact on park rangers, a couple drownings, an aquatic body recovery and other sad outdoor tragedies, and funny and scary encounters with bears and other wildlife. If you like Jack Kerouac, Nevada Barr, Bree Loewen, Jon Krakauer, Michael Connelly, James Dickey's Deliverance, Matthew Quick's The Silver Linings Playbook or Scott Heim's Mysterious Skin, you may enjoy Desolation Ghosts.

Thursday, October 21, 2021

Polidor

The last time I went to Paris, I reserved rooms via fax at an inexpensive hotel in Paris 6. We were excited to learn Rimbaud had stayed in our room at the Hotel Stella in the late 1800s. What the hotel proprietor and our Let's Go Paris 1998 didn't tell us (and I just learned from the internets) was that the restaurant (Le Polidor) in the bottom corner of the hotel had been popular not only with La Belle Epoque writers, but with Hemingway, and therefore all the Jazz Age ex-pat writers and artists we spent 8 days death-stalking through Paris, as well as the writers of the next generations (Miller, Kerouac, etc) who followed them there. Tragically, we did not eat there!

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