Goodreads Authors/Readers discussion

Passing Place is for sale at a reduced price for this week of only $1

The novel centres around Richard, a professional musician whom wife committed suicide after a long battle with depression two years before we meet him. His response to this tragic event, and his way of dealing with his grief, was to go on a quest to find the answer to that most impossible of questions, why?,. He sold everything he owned, bought a car and set off across America, before selling the car and started riding the greyhound busses instead once the money started running out. Always moving, never finding an answer because there was no answer to find, driven by his grief and a sense of anger with the universe. When we meet him he is at the end of this journey, broke, with just the clothes he is wearing, stood at a bus station in a mid-west town he doesn’t even know the name of, at midnight in a thunderstorm, at which point a cat, of all things, draws his attention to a card the bus station window. ‘Piano player wanted, Esquiths Piano bar and grill, Location relative…’ Intrigued despite himself, he sets off into the night for the centre of this nameless town to find the bar. As much as anything, because its something to do, and because he had the strangest feeling the cat drew his attention to the card by talking to him. He doesn’t rule out hysteria at this point… The bar proves impossible to find until he suddenly does, in a place he was sure he found nothing moments before, again he is not ruling out a lapse in his sanity at this point… Despite this, he enters the place anyway.
So Richard finds himself playing piano in this odd little bar that is not always so little, The doorman tells him a tale which is ridiculous on one level, tragic on another, and impossible in its entirety, yet has echoes of his own. This is but the first of tales he hears in the bar, from other staff members, and its patrons. A gunslinger tells him a tale of an old west that never was, and a death that stalked in from the high plains. An Inuit tells him the saga of the Ice queen, the longest of nights and diamonds shed like tears. The grey man who cleans the floors tells him of the grey world from which he comes, while the chef in the kitchen makes him sandwichs before he orders them by bending the laws of causality. Other tales are told and each seems to hold a meaning if only Richard could grasp what the meanings were. The green haired girl behind the bar shows him the Forrest in the cellar and he walks through Paris on a hot summers night fifty years before he was born. For as Sonny the doorman explains, the bar is a passing place, that sits between worlds, and its doors can open out in to anywhere, and anywhen… But never to the one place and time Richard would most wish to be, a bathroom in the lower east side two years and a few hours ago where he could finally get an answer to that impossible question, or prevent it ever needing to be asked in the first place…
meanwhile, something lurks in the darkest corners of the bar, something threatening, something sinister, and something red… and the cat’s still talking to him…

In essence its a story about stories made up of stories being told in a bar after hours somewhere between late and early. It’s also a story of seeking salvation and solace in strange places. It’s also a damn good way to write a book of short stories and sandwich them around a greater novel but hey I have never claimed otherwise…

My other novel Cider Lane is also on a kindle sale week ...