Book Description
Journalist Typo Blod is struggling to persuade CitySidewalk magazine’s editor, Jonas Wheeler, to commission some articles from him when he encounters C.O. Jones, a mysterious, homeless character, begging on a commuter train. Jones claims to be trapped in a "vicious circle" and shows Blod a book that has a dramatic and physical effect: It causes Blod to slip through a crack in reality and find himself in the driving seat of a car, on a road nothing to do with the city in which he thought he lived.
In the part historical, part fantastical city of Fulcrum, Jones re-appears to provoke Blod with questions about distant memories. They are ‘clues’ and Blod’s answers propel him along an increasingly bizarre storyline, in which he is absorbed by the scenes of Edward Hopper’s paintings like a fly in amber, Time halts at the instant depicted in Hopper’s most famous works and Blod falls in love with Ellen Bogen, the subject of the painting Summertime.
Liquidambar combines the noir atmosphere of the Philip Marlowe adventures with the characters and imagery of Hopper’s paintings in a magical surrealism detective story.
From the Inside Flap
On a commuter train, luckless journalist Typo Blod encounters C. O. Jones, a homeless beggar. Jones claims to be trapped in a "vicious circle" and shows him a mysterious book that has a dramatic and physical effect on Blod, who slips through a crack in reality and finds himself in the driving seat of a lake placid blue Indomitable Afterglow Streetcruiser. Arriving in Fulcrum, a city tantalisingly part historical, part fantastical, he becomes obsessed with Ellen Bogen, the subject of Hopper’s painting Summertime. But there can only be so many characters in this new world (after all there’s only so much paint) and as soon as someone new appears, someone else must go. Everything is skewed — not least, the cast of femme fatales, evil Pierrots, cross-dressers, matrons of death, petty villains and hapless extortionists — but with Jones’s help, Blod learns to appreciate the 'liquid amber' of the present moment and realises he has a choice; and one that he will have to make, if ever he is to get out of Fulcrum.
From the Back Cover
The train moves forward in its pockets of pale light, leaving one place behind and moving into another like a snake shedding its skin. I always seem to have been moving from one station to another, through towns strange and forbidding in their obscurity; indistinct darknesses, abstract shapes beyond the glass. I never seem to have reached what was important, never quite made it to the station for which I was bound. But now there is a sense of new adventure.
I head off in search of the young woman in the black dress.
About the Author
CHRIS BELL was born in the autumn of the 20th Century. Shrugging off this early setback, he moved from Holyhead to Hamburg, via London, in a futile search for any of the trappings of rock superstardom, before arriving in New Zealand where, having gone as far as he could, he now works as a writer. His short stories have appeared in The Third Alternative; Grotesque; The Heidelberg Review; Transversions; Not One of Us and Takahe, as well as on the internet, which you can get on your computer, apparently. 'The Cruel Countess' was anthologised in 'The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror (10th Annual Edition)', published by St Martin’s Griffin Books, in which his collection 'The Bumper Book of Lies' received an Honourable Mention. He was editor of a technology management magazine for five-and-a-half years, but utterly failed to recognise the widespread adoption of the mobile phone and is now unfashionably out of range. It is thought that Liquidambar is his first novel. It was the winner of the 2004 UKAuthors/PADB ‘Great Read’ Novel Writing competition. He has described himself as "a glass-two-thirds-empty sort of a person".
