Sleeping in Flame

Product Description <br/>Walker Easterling is a retired actor turned successful screenwriter living in the Vienna of strong coffee, fascinating friends, and mysterious cafes. When he falls in love with Maris York, a beautiful artist who creates cities, his life becomes alive in fantastic and unsettling ways. As Walker's love for Maris grows, his life gets more and more bizarre-he discovers he can see things happening just before they happen, and at the same time feels an incredibly strong tug from his past-so a friend steers him to Venasque, an odd little man reputed to be a powerful shaman. Venasque helps Walker discover and unravel his many interconnected past lives, and it is soon clear that an unresolved conflict from these past lives has resurfaced, and now threatens to undo Walker and Maris's love.<br/>At once lyrical, frightening, funny, and sexy, Sleeping in Flame is a spellbinding tale where reality and fantasy merge in astonishing convolutions of magic and suspense. It confirms that Jonathan Carroll is one of the very few novelists who-by constantly surprising us-give us an entirely new perspective on our world. It is no wonder that he is generally considered to be the most original and provocative novelist of his generation.<br/> From Publishers Weekly <br/>In this farfetched story of reincarnation among the beautiful people, actor Walker Easterling, living in Vienna with sculptor/ex-model Maris York, stumbles upon traces of his previous lives. In Los Angeles to make a horror flick, Westerling undergoes a Castaneda-like training with Venasque, a shaman. He discovers that in one former lifetime he was the son of a cruel, overpossessive German midget with magical powers who pushed him out a window to his death. When Maris conceives, Walker, who was raised as an orphan in Atlanta, must resolve the conflicts of his past lives, or lose his fiancee and their unborn child. Dreams, prophetic visions and the sighting of a purple sea serpent propel his quest, in which the Rumpelstiltskin tale of the Brothers Grimm figures prominently. In what begins as a highly literate parapsychological puzzler, Carroll ( Bones of the Moon ) shifts gears into fantasy and fairy tale, with results that may not be wholly satisfactory to fans of any one genre.<br/>Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.<br/> About the Author <br/>JONATHAN CARROLL is the globally-praised author of The Land of Laughs and The Wooden Sea.<br/> Review <br/>“Jonathan Carroll has the magic. He'll lend you his eyes; and you will never see the world in quite the same way ever again.” ―Neil Gaiman<br/>“Jonathan Carroll is a master of sunlit surrealism.” ―Jonathan Lethem<br/> Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. <br/>Chapter OneIt took me less than half a lifetime to realize that regret is one of the few guaranteed certainties. Sooner or later everything is touched by it, despite our naive and senseless hope that just this time we will be spared its cold hand on our heart.The day after we met, Maris York told me I had saved her life. We were in a café, and she said this through the folds of a black sweater she was pulling over her head. I was glad she was lost in the middle of that pullover because the statement, although true, made me feel much too brave and adult and embarrassed. I didn’t know what to answer.“It’s quite true, Walker. The next time I saw him he would have killed me.”“Maybe he just wanted to go on scaring you.”“No, he would have tried to kill me.”The voice carried no emotion. Her big hands lay open and still on the pink and blue marble table. I wondered if the stone was cold under her palms. If I had been really brave I would have covered her hand with mine. I didn’t.Every once in a while my friend Nicholas Sylvian calls, in a huff, and says he wants us to make another movie together. He’s got some new moneybags lined up to finance one of the many projects we’ve discussed. When that happens, I usually stop what I’m doing and give hi