“Setting Sun Story, Book 1: Awash In Jealous Freedoms” ($18 in paperback from Douglas Hufford Publishing; also for Amazon Kindle) is more than a sword-and-sorcery tale full of dangerous visions and powerful magic. “As my ‘adolescent “whys”’ ended I was able to look back on my teenage, and later on, early adult mindsets with a critical lens…. I hope that this sort of post-modern, tragic, transcendentalist approach to such a story could act as an inspiring place for folks to get a fresh view of their own lives.”
Hufford imagines a great spired city, Baustas, ruled by powerful Deacons who are answerable to a mysterious figure called “the Savior,” that is a bulwark against the “Savages” outside. Baustas is “Place of Peace,” an “ark” to carry its inhabitants from the present world, bathed in the constant red glow from the sun and moon, into a future world of light.
For the Prophecy to be fulfilled, the Deacons must raise up a cadre of Chosen along with fighters called Patriots. Young Adam, as the story opens, may be one among the Chosen, but it is unclear whether that is his true mantle. Adam thinks those within the city, “blessed by a divine Savior,” are “refugees from reality.”
The Deacons say the “world outside is … a place forsaken,” and “the Baustians … should be able to cure the world of its disorientation. Cleanse the Chaos, and heal it all.” But only a few, the Deacons and the Chosen, “have ever left this place.”
Elsewhere in the story, young Erin and Rain, brothers in arms, discover a mechanistic world underneath Baustas, and together with Jun, a young woman of mysterious origins, must face the implications of free will in a real world not controlled by the Savior. A cliffhanger ending awaits Book 2.
