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$12.99

Up Through the Darkness

by Wayne Aronsen

A Novel, Softcover, 318 pages, 1st printing, 2022

Shipped to America from Denmark by her German officer lover, alone, forsaken and pregnant, Anders’ mother ends up with her infant son in a small town on the coast of central California–the war over. Anders grows up with his reclusive mother, unaware of her past until her despondency finally drives her to suicide when he is eighteen years old. Forty years later, now a wealthy resident and prosperous businessman of the same town, a chance meeting with an old German rancher begins the revelation of Anders’ family history and the ruin of his businesses in real estate and a five-star restaurant. Small town corruption, the noirish coastal setting, a cast of strong female characters, and a mysterious benefactor lead him to a final violent act.

Up Through the Darkness is ultimately the study of Anders’ melancholy nature–how he copes and how he is redeemed.

Three pelicans glided above the shore, a V formation of synchronized flight. Their wide wings waved in tandem to maintain an altitude just above the rocky coast. Anders watched them until they disappeared, one by one, below the bluffs headed to their colonies in an estuary north of his house. Seated on a stone wall bordering the back of his patio, he braced himself against the late afternoon wind and turned to face the ocean. A narrow band of blue stretched across the western horizon—the delineation between sea and sky where the setting sun would eventually escape the gray cloud bank and make its brief final appearance. A ceremony he had celebrated many times over the years, when the fiery light spread like dye across the water’s surface, a reflection of celestial brilliance, extinguished just as quickly with the sun’s descent into the darkening sea. He recalled lines from a poem: –dim beaches deep in sand––stretching indistinguishably—all the way to where my reasons end— Slumping further and further into indifference, he turned to watch dark storm clouds approach from the north along the mountainous coastline, burial clouds in a spreading black mass. Late afternoons on his patio with a bottle of wine and a small meal were once times of serenity and disengagement from the day’s turmoil. Not anymore.