The Fan-Shaped Destiny of William Seabrook

the long version

To the one who perhaps cared the most. In the twilight of the twentieth century, a young woman broods over a cryptic birthright, an inheritance addressed to her before she was born. Shaped by an abusive past, only the most intense sensations can unchain her heart. Meanwhile, a nameless, corroded sixties malcontent orbits the far point of his life. As his reason unravels, he pines for the redemption of an exhausted history. And in a darkening yesterday, William Seabrook, an all-but-forgotten writer of the Lost Generation - expatriate, explorer, suicide - wrestles with more remorse than one life can contain. Behind, and up ahead, and in-between these strange travelers, an old woman is dying in a decaying Victorian home. At the terminus of a full life, her memories warp and twist like the adjacent rooms, their doors remaining just a little bit ajar. In an odyssey that morphs extension and duration, blown upon storms of synchronicity, two improbable lovers bond in a sexual obsession with the dead, chasing the ghosts of fantasies become all-too-real. At the end of their quest - or is it the beginning - waits the fatidic document called The Fan-Shaped Destiny.The past has caught up with the present.