Author? Title?
Last night, I dreamt I went to Archer City again. Larry McMurtry didn't seem to be anywhere around. Secretly, I was a little relieved. Hero worship was so exhausting and time-consuming. I didn't have much time, and it was best spent looking for books.
While browsing through a particularly lip-smacking stack, I found an older novel with a green hardcover. The plot was about this ordinary guy who was the victim of a set-up. Serious crime or misdemeanor, I don't know, but the set-up was so cruelly and brilliantly executed that there was no chance of this guy ever clearing his name. Flipping through the pages, I understood that the book would detail the rest of his miserable life as a series of harshly slammed doors leading into smaller and smaller rooms. The novel was written in that precise and inexorable manner reminiscent of Edith Wharton, but it also had a gritty underside and was honeycombed with brutality like something by Jim Thompson.
What an incredible read! I had to have this book! I was shaking with the bibliophile version of buck fever. What was the title? Who wrote it? I flailed endlessly through the pages (around 400) until I fumbled onto the title page. Missing! Copyright page? Blurred beyond legibility. The cover? The spine?
I was just turning the book around to read the spine when I woke up in my own bed, thousands of miles from Archer City. My hands were clutching at nothing and yes, it was too dark to read.
While browsing through a particularly lip-smacking stack, I found an older novel with a green hardcover. The plot was about this ordinary guy who was the victim of a set-up. Serious crime or misdemeanor, I don't know, but the set-up was so cruelly and brilliantly executed that there was no chance of this guy ever clearing his name. Flipping through the pages, I understood that the book would detail the rest of his miserable life as a series of harshly slammed doors leading into smaller and smaller rooms. The novel was written in that precise and inexorable manner reminiscent of Edith Wharton, but it also had a gritty underside and was honeycombed with brutality like something by Jim Thompson.
What an incredible read! I had to have this book! I was shaking with the bibliophile version of buck fever. What was the title? Who wrote it? I flailed endlessly through the pages (around 400) until I fumbled onto the title page. Missing! Copyright page? Blurred beyond legibility. The cover? The spine?
I was just turning the book around to read the spine when I woke up in my own bed, thousands of miles from Archer City. My hands were clutching at nothing and yes, it was too dark to read.
4 comments:
NO!!!! A dream so real it's almost, you know, real. I can't imagine anything more frustrating! Beautiful writing also, by the way.
Sounds more like a nightmare...you found the perfect book, yet you may never know what it is! Maybe tonight will bring part 3?
Maybe it's the book you are meant to write?
Yikes!
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