“Phaedra”

Can love blossom in a French cemetery? Well, perhaps, if it’s the Père-Lachaise, “the first garden cemetery in the world,” established in 1804 and the resting place of Jim Morrison, lead singer for the classic rock group The Doors.

In the sequel to “Ember,” Chico novelist-photographer and cemetery symbolism expert Doug Keister brings cemetery symbolism expert Jerry Jensen to the Père-Lachaise. He’s there with Ember Owens and Ember’s daughter (on the cusp of turning 21). Her name? “Phaedra” ($12.99 in paperback, independently published; also for Amazon Kindle).

Phaedra is there with her new sculptor friend Pierre, who in a short time is becoming more significant in her life. The trip is intended to be a healing time for Jerry, Ember and Phaedra after their trauma in the States, when a psychopath named Jason Lewis kidnaps both Phaedra and Ember. (Jason murdered his ex-wife Amber after she married Jerry. Complicated? Yes.)

Ember and Phaedra both escape, but there’s a fire and Jason is horribly burned. He’s still alive and in the new novel bent on recapturing his prey.

Yet, especially in the first half, sinister doings give way to Jerry’s guided tour of some of the key monuments in the cemetery (complete with dozens of Keister photographs). An extensive appendix after the novel ends expands on many of the monuments, including those of actress Sarah Bernhardt, composer Frédéric Chopin, writer Gertrude Stein and partner Alice B. Toklas, and mime Marcel Marceau. Keister also explores catacombs, a repository of skulls and bones, which play an important part in the novel’s action.

It's really inner action that is the focus, though, as Phaedra comes to terms with having been given up for adoption by Ember (who was raped as a teenager) and needing not only to understand why, but to find herself. Responding to Jerry’s stories, she keeps asking herself “What were the dead trying to tell her?”

Keister’s novel is a monument to monuments but also raises the question, as Phaedra’s life unfolds, “What are the living trying to tell us”? 

Doug Keister is Nancy Wiegman’s guest on Nancy’s Bookshelf on Northstate Public Radio, mynspr.org, Wednesday, January 22 at 10:00 a.m., repeated Sunday, January 26 at 8:00 p.m.

“Ember”

Early on in Chicoan Douglas Keister’s new novella (his forty-seventh book), a beautiful, 37-year-old woman asks her coffeeshop companion a question: “So, Jeremiah Quincy Jensen the Third, how did you become interested in cemeteries?”

Jerry, as he likes to be called, is a taphophile, “a cemetery lover,” giving lectures on cemetery symbolism and publishing books on it as well. As the 54-year-old academic shares a bit of his story, it’s clear for both of them something else is going on. 

“They were seeking common ground not so much to find a shared interest,” Keister writes, “but to find a way to explore the palpable chemical connection they both had felt the second they met. Love at first sight seemed trite and hackneyed, but that’s exactly what it was.”

The woman, with her “vibrant red hair,” is named “Ember” ($10.99 in paperback, independently published; also for Amazon Kindle). “The word ‘ember,’” she explains, “means a small spark or flame, a symbol of a fire that burns deep within. It can also signify the fading remains of a past emotion.”

Jerry understands; while Ember Owens is good at “finding and losing boyfriends,” Jerry lost the love of his life some two decades earlier. Amber (so like Ember) had married Jerry after her first marriage--to moneyed charmer Jason Lewis who turned “jealous, possessive and violent,”--disintegrated. Jerry and Amber were celebrating Amber’s thirty-third birthday when Jason intervened. Amber did not survive.

As the relationship between Jerry and Ember deepens, with the sex extraordinary and fiery, both suspect their own motives. Jerry wonders whether showing Ember his late wife’s grave at the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in New York makes Ember a kind of substitute. Ember wonders if this is just another encounter, destined to fizzle, never enabling her to come to terms with her rape as a teenager and giving up the resulting child in a closed adoption.

Their love will be tested as a sinister plot comes to fruition while they are visiting Sleepy Hollow. Jerry, ever the professor, explains some of the symbols on the gravestones that signify membership in secret societies. And then their lives change forever.

It’s a romantic thriller with, ahem, a great plot.

"Going Out In Style: The Architecture Of Eternity"

With books such as "Stories In Stone: A Field Guide To Cemetery Symbolism And Iconography" and "Forever L.A.: A Field Guide To Los Angeles Area Cemeteries And Their Residents," Chico writer-photographer Douglas Keister has unearthed extraordinary tales of the dearly departed. His interest in funerary art began with a ground-breaking collaboration with Xavier Cronin, an editor at American Cemetery magazine, in a book first published in 1997.

A new edition is now available. "Going Out In Style: The Architecture Of Eternity" ($24.95 in hardcover from Echo Point Books & Media, echopointbooks.com) features an introduction by Cronin and hundreds of Keister's full-color photographs and captivating captions. As a blurb notes, "mausoleums, statues, and memorials are a connection between the modern world and the generations that went before us."

"The word mausoleum," Cronin writes, "is derived from the name Mausolus, king of Halicarnassus, a great harbor city in the kingdom of Caria in Asia Minor (modern Turkey), whose tomb was a huge fortress build in 353 B.C. by Mausolus's wife Artemisia (who happened also to be his sister)." Some years later, in 1831, "the rise of the American mausoleum begins with our first 'rural' cemetery--Mount Auburn, just down the street from Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts."

Keister's chapters focus on architectural styles, what's inside the tombs, the depiction of humans in the cemetery, public buildings in the cemetery, and creative funerary arts (such as the Cogswell Monument in Oakland, a "70-foot granite obelisk crowned with a 10-inch rose crystal star and surrounded by curious carved stone sculptures" depicting Faith, Hope, Charity, and Temperance; dentist Henry Daniel Cogswell, who died in 1900, "was an ardent foe of demon rum").

Inside the Blocher Monument at Forest Lawn Cemetery in New York one can find a statue of Nelson Blocher, who passed away in 1884, "resting peacefully on his back," carved from "gleaming white Carrara marble." It's said Blocher died of a broken heart when his philanthropist father fired Blocher's true love, a maid who worked for ol' dad, who, "perhaps motivated by guilt," honored Blocher "with this eccentric memorial."

Who better to bring these stories to light than Keister, Chico's premier "crypt-ographer"?