The House of Great Spirit

About the Book

The locales of these stories range from California and Utah to Massachusetts and Vermont. The characters seek a paradise of one kind or another but have to make do with the world such as it is -- and all attendant twists and turns. Had this book a motto, it would be, “Don’t let the bastards grind you down.” In The House of Great Spirit, the title story in this collection, the narrator lives “in a small room in a big three-story red brick boarding house in Salt Lake City” where the “live-in-manager was Jon Severs. Already, only in his mid-twenties, lanky Severs had found his calling. It was his job to scold the tenants at Jack Mead's house in Mead's stead – to bawl them out. On rent day he went room to room to collect money. If you didn't pay at once, he screwed his face up in a look of almost crushing contempt.” Though there are also incidences of grace, courage, and joy along the way, things generally go from bad to worse. They say it’s always good to touch bottom, in order to start over again. A female narrator once married to the character Eben Anders, admits “there were times I wished we'd never met. When we did first meet, I fell for him.” She tells the story of how, as a younger man, Eben had found a treasure not only of money, but also of revelations. Finding himself in the role of prophet, Eben was “denounced as a madman, liar, scoundrel, false prophet, and the rest. He'd be accused of witchcraft, wizardry, demonism, and Freemasonry, with a mind to eventual world subjugation. He'd even be called the living Anti-Christ. ‘Don’t kill the messenger,’ is all Eben would ever say to all of that.” They say you can’t win for losing. His ex-wife, having divorced Eben and renounced “Ebenism”, is now accused of “destroying uncounted sacred privileges and worlds and futures.” She’s having none of that. In With a View to The Sea, librarian Lars Donnelly tells the story of his voyage from his west coast roots to his marriage and years of parenting in the east. Lars had explained it to his wife, "I don't want my kids to be asking me in future years, 'What did you do in the Internet Revolution, daddy?' and have to tell them that I'd just played it safe.” He proposes going, with his teenage son Sean, to an important conference, “eBooks and Libraries,” taking place in southern California, right on the oceanfront. “They reached the convention center around half past eight, giving them plenty of time to take advantage of the free Continental Breakfast while hobnobbing, or not, with the growing throngs of librarians, library trustees, heads of library Friends groups, chief executive officers, directors of operations, product managers, senior and junior business development managers, senior and junior systems analysts, and a broad swath of consultants, hackers, geeks, and gawkers.” And maybe a ghost from the past. They say what goes around comes around, but what could possibly go wrong?

About the Author

Tom Foran Clark, a native Californian born in Burbank, went to public schools, completed his undergraduate studies in Logan, Utah, and graduate studies in Boston, Massachusetts. He has lived and worked in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, France, and Germany. He is the author of The Significance of Being Frank, a biography of the 19th century Concord, Massachusetts schoolteacher and Radical Abolitionist Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, himself the chronicler and biographer of the life and times of John Brown, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau. Clark is also the author of Freewheeling, an adventure fiction series in four parts: Riding in Italy, Derailed in North Africa, Rambling in Spain, and Writing on Crete. Beyond his own writing and vagabonding, Clark has worked, variously over the years, in advertising as a graphic artist and copy editor, a quality assurance engineer for assorted eBooks and marketing firms and, occasionally, off and on, a public library director. Long a bookman, for several years he has been the proprietor of the online bookstore, The Bungalow Shop.