Thursday, March 29, 2012

Behind "In the Shadow of Midnight"

On a steamy September Savannah day in 2005, my wife and I, with our wheezing bichon frise, escaped the 90-degree heat into our rented condo on East Broad Street in the Trustee's Garden section of town. We were grateful for the Savannah-capacity air conditioning in our vacation bungalow as we collapsed on our bed to take an afternoon nap. (Southerners would be appalled at the wimpy excuses we have for air conditioners in Pennsylvania.) A few hours later, I awoke and looked out the front window to see four police cruisers, an ambulance and a hearse at the building across the street. We watched the paramedics roll out two bodies and immediately assumed murder/suicide.

The two bodies were Bob and Tina Stoddard. As the story of their lives and deaths unfolded, I was drawn to them as flawed, tragic, but sympathetic characters who lived in the shadow of the more celebrated goings-on on Monterey Square.  Their attempts to enjoy the magical world that Jim Williams and the Savannah elite created always fell short. Their desire, Bob's in particular, to be a part of that Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil world ultimately destroyed them.

In the next few blogs, I will provide some back story to the tale In the Shadow of Midnight: Daedalus, a Tale of Savannah.

In the opening scene, where I describe the tourists rounding the corner, turning toward the river, and never seeing the vehicular apparatus of death deployed outside the Stoddard's apartment, it reminded me of Breugel's painting, The Fall of Icarus. The parallel between Daedalus and Bob Stoddard became too obvious to ignore.

I coupled the two stories to play on two gothic concepts:  ancestral ghosts and the strange sort of predestination they appear to exert in some people's lives. The myths of Ovid are just as alive today as they were when written and when Breugel was painting a millennia and half later.

Friday, March 16, 2012

New narrative non-fiction available

Valhalla Press has just published In the Shadow of Midnight: Daedalus, A Tale of Savannah by Albert Davenport.

To preview the narrative nonfiction work, click here: