"Fleet"

"On the day that he turned seven years old," we're told in Brian T. Marshall's extraordinary new novel, "Simon Patrick gave himself a gift. On that day, and every day that followed, he would learn a new word … because for him, words were like candy, tiny little nuggets you popped in your mouth, only to find them expanding, exploding, engulfing you with new flavors, new worlds. … And today, this morning, a good half-century later? This morning's word was serendipity."

Marshall, a Ridge-area writer, has crafted a tale that begins as a mystery and opens up into a realm where gods and goddesses are real, the story of life on earth is not what it seems, and where that very life is threatened by a powerful malevolence from beyond the world.

"Fleet" (available in an Amazon Kindle edition from missppelled press in Magalia; missppelled.com) immerses the reader in a novel so well written it would not be out of place on a national bestseller list.

Serendipity? Everything will change for Simon Patrick, a nondescript professor with an Alzheimer's diagnosis who, as luck has it, finds (as Si tells his friend Ben Carlson, a New York police officer) that "things that might seem pointless, or stupid, or random, suddenly grab you by the collar and won’t let go."

Thus Si helps Ben in communicating with a man found naked on the streets of Manhattan and arrested, a man who doesn't even know his own name, a man speaking an odd language--ancient Greek.

Si is more than intrigued; he bails out the man and takes him home. And gives him a name: "Noman." The stranger begins to learn English at an incredible rate, and it turns out he is incredibly fleet of feet as well. When Si's new housekeeper, Sarah Rhodes, a student at Si's university, takes Noman on an outing to Central Park, he bests an Olympic-caliber runner with nary a bit of hard breathing.

Marshall's work seems effortless, too, as he enmeshes the reader in a world which wrestles with questions about the place of violence and the nature of the split between gods and humans. Here is a talent to be reckoned with.