Omens in a Dry Season

About the Book

Omens in a Dry Season charts a Vietnam veteran´s return to Yosemite after military service. A once-gifted teen climber, now back to finish an unclimbed route that the climbing culture believes cannot be done, Neil Malone is a creation out of the tradition of characters trembled by war. Having been transformed by the jungle, he finds his world gone, and when a young climber falls past him to his death, he interprets this as a warning from the granite itself, and nature becomes a seemingly conscious god casting omens before him. His desire is to climb without equipment, but he finds he cannot now cross the line back into the madness of his youth. Feeling profoundly alone, he befriends two climbers from the San Joaquin Valley who call themselves Geronimo and Cochise. Enthralled by the mythic history of Yosemite climbing, Geronimo, never out of his fantasy to be the great Apache warrior, sees in Malone a worthy partner, but Malone seems reticent to move on. When Geronimo embraces the story of a new myth, one that presents the tale of a solo climbing little girl, a young goddess of the high space where granite meets air, Neil Malone returns to the granite walls to search out his god in the form of this little girl called Hummingbird. Set in a world that treads the boundary between myth and early 70´s Yosemite climbing, Omens expresses solitude and isolation as a consequence of existence outside the collective human family. It examines the vacuum that follows profound loss and illustrates how far one man is willing to go in an effort to reclaim his own innocence. If you are one who wants to have done without actually doing, Michael O´Laughlin, an award-winning short story writer, will take you into the space on a harrowing journey that captures the height, the euphoria, and the rapture that climbing must be, in this, his first novel.

About the Author

Michael O’Laughlin, born in 1952, was the recipient of the 1992 Henfield Prize, a $3,000 award for The Diorite Whales, a story nominated for that prize by Pulitzer Prize winner James Alan McPherson. Upon O’Laughlin’s completion of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop MFA program, McPherson wrote of his former student: “O’Laughlin’s chosen landscape is the American West. His fiction deals with the heroic efforts of men to challenge and confront nature and to define themselves, in terms of values, through this process. He is an admirable writer.” O’Laughlin presently teaches creative writing at Lake Tahoe Community College.