“There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”
– Leonard Cohen –
In Marcus’s capable hands, the sandy stretch of shore along Route 1 between Lewes and Bethany Beach becomes a halfway point between the living and the dead, humans and gods, magic and the lack of it, in which categories normally kept apart promiscuously commingle, bleeding into each other in unexpected ways that bring the cosmic down to earth and raise the mundane to the heavens. – Realms of Fantasy
Marcus delivers a touching and often melancholy contemporary fantasy that deftly avoids straying into over-sentimentality. While on a family vacation, alcoholic father Gene crashes his car and ends up in a coma. As he flashes back through his various misadventures, his wife and son both find themselves dealing with supernatural encounters. Maggie, a recovering alcoholic herself, has visions of hitting a dog her husband had killed years ago, while alcohol mysteriously appears in their rented trailer. Teen Gabe meets Otto, a man who looks like God but might just be a trickster spirit. The supernatural is present throughout, but Marcus focuses on the characters attempting to deal with real-world stressors like Gene’s injuries and Gabe’s hormones. Marcus’s characters are believable and layered, avoiding the clichés that so often plague novels of addiction, and the emotional climax pays off nicely. – Publishers’ Weekly
Gene hovers in the darkness.
Above him the sky, opening up like a burning flower over the road. His throat is so dry. Strip mall like a jumble of alphabet blocks, bright flashes everywhere lancing off mirrored surfaces, tight turn pressing him against the door as he feels himself pulled toward the source, guided toward the light. He hears snatches of rock and roll, echoing like they’re being played in a tile room — a phase-shifted Hendrix lick, a Clapton arpeggio. His foot punches the gas like it’s not even a part of him but picking up a scrambled message from some other station and the window rises in front of him, growing in telescoping flashes, filling the sky and collapsing with a sound like ripping velcro, sparkling like dust, beautiful.
An instant of perfect silence just after the Escort wraps itself around a concrete post in the middle of the store. People frozen like statues, mouths open in identical ‘O’s. Gene almost wants to wave at them but he is flying, flying, and the top of his head meets the windshield in a gentle caress, pushing out the glass until something somewhere gives and he bursts through like a diver breaking the dappled surface of a pool from below.
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