"Choosing The Dark"

Ridge-area novelist Brian Marshall has written a psychological coming-of-age story about life and death. "Choosing The Dark" (self-published, for Amazon Kindle) transports the reader to the early 80s in San Francisco. Punk is on the wane, hippie heaven a chimera, and a mysterious disease is taking lives in the gay community.

"Way back when, in Pleistocene times," the narrator remembers, "there were people who lived on the margins, people for whom having little, caring less, wasn’t an outcome, but a choice. A decision to live in the dark. To shout, and sneer, and flail away, burning at both ends. Love, as it turned out, wasn’t the answer, and so they’d tried something else. Something that tasted like Drano, and sounded like a scream."

This is the scene that attracts young Robert Walstein, finished with high school in Mill Valley, one of those "spoiled white kids from Marin," who yearns to escape the shadow of his mother Carol, a classical/modernist composer, from whom he is estranged. 

In the first half of the novel, "Learning To Live," Rob hooks up with the mysterious Annie and becomes the drummer for a band headed by Kurt, whose song lyrics are "crazy, nonsensical, completely left-field, but totally, totally right. Spilling from Kurt in this deep baritone, the sob of some lost soul. He is singing from hell, Rob suddenly knows. The place that he calls home."

The second half, "Learning To Die," is dominated by Sol Myers, an older gay man who becomes Rob's mentor, his guide to coping with death (ominously, Carol is diagnosed with breast cancer), who finds in Rob a kind of naive passion needing to embrace the truth about human mortality. 

Rob feels ashamed of the one-time "raunchy, burlesque Marx Brothers number" that he dances with Sol, but he "knows instead that it’s Life. Dragging him round the dance floor. Wringing his body dry. Letting him know that, yes, he will die, but in the meantime there is this. A moment between being born and being buried. Don’t blink or you’ll miss it, fool."

Family reconciliation is possible, Marshall says in this deeply probing novel, but the cost may be beyond what you can imagine.