Running for Your Life: Enter “The Gateway”

My wife Mary Morris, the literary force of nature, why indeed it’s Mother Nature (and Mother Time, for that matter, if we were to give the matter the thought it deserves and bestow titles accordingly), is proud to announce the launch of her next work of fiction:

“Gateway to the Moon,” a novel, and its official publication date is Tuesday, April 10.

The novel opens in northern New Mexico, where we are introduced to Miguel Torres. Okay, full disclosure, I love this kid. Five pages with him and you will too. A tour de force follows.

It’s a weird time right now. Lots of folks flailing … I wrote this Sunday, April 8, (we are a family of writers, alas) for a magazine column in the New York Post. It is a testament to how we are preoccupied with the political, the social, the chaos ….

“Over at Harper’s, Thomas Frank, of “What’s the Matter with Kansas: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America” notoriety, is waxing Cassandra-like with a cautionary tale for liberal democrats in the Age of Trump. The cover fits the tone of his piece perfectly, with a blissfully serene president floating above warring throngs of graying elites. His beef: folks upset with Trump, believing that a humanist savior, this time not Hillary Clinton but Special Counsel Bob Mueller, will rise from the ashes that is the current political scene and guide the righteous to the promised land of Democratic Party rule. Sorry, Frank says. If that’s the best the left can do, rather than fix the message for those poor people still waiting in Kansas (Frank published that book back in 2004) for an answer to their troubles, then yep, it’ll be four more years of Trump coming January 2021.”

We need, more than ever, novels like “Gateway to the Moon,” to restore our faith in great literature, to be in the hands of a master storyteller, to reorient ourselves, to remind ourselves, what is truly at the heart of the human soul.

Next: Running for Your Life: Humbled by Humboldt