A Memory of Fire: A Novel of Indeterminate Conflagrations

Let it be said that, even in simplicity, there is the opportunity to become befuddled and to lose one's way. A Memory of Fire follows a simple man who was guided by his conscience and natural impulses until he encountered a homeless man who was simultaneously damaged, vulnerable, enigmatic and monstrous. With the squatter in the lead, the man finds himself engaged in a cross-country quest, the object of which has never been thoroughly explained to him and in which he begins through gradual degrees of disorientation to lose sight of his guiding principles. Eventually, he must choose whether to press forward, continuing to aid the squatter, despite the threat of fire, real and imagined, or to abandon the quest and return home, if such a path still exists for him.

Written in a tone balancing the vernacular and the philosophical, A Memory of Fire presents a straightforward narrative, in which the innocent and the experienced collide and neither emerges unchanged.

Although the author had apparently completely lost all memory of it, Poison Pie, Man of the Mushroom People, makes his literary debut in A Memory of Fire. Perhaps it is the presence of his mushroom-inspired Shakespearean sonnets that prompted the author to forget.

A Memory of Fire was written from April to September of 1997, when the author was working as a post-doctoral fellow in the Theoretical Chemistry Group at the United States Naval Research Laboratory in Southeast Washington, DC.