Steven Manners
Список книг автора Steven MannersOndine's Curse
Set in contemporary Montreal, Ondine’s Curse follows the attempts of Robert Strasser, a television documentary producer, to film the life of Dr. Werther Acheson, the German director of a controversial psychiatric institute. In the course of his journey through Acheson’s murky past, Strasser meets Ondine, one of the institute’s patients, and soon finds himself increasingly fascinated by the haunted young woman. It is Ondine who is at the heart of this powerful probe of the human psyche. A historian, she is trying to complete her own research into the death of Shawnadithit, a Beothuk Indian woman who was the last survivor of a Newfoundland tribe that was exterminated by settlers in the 1820s. But Ondine’s ability to cope in the modern world is crippled by a repressed memory of violence as a witness to the Montreal Massacre in 1989 when fourteen women were slain in Canada’s most shocking mass murder. Moody and macabre, Steven Manners’s expressionist novel is a literary tour de force that lurches through the dementia of the twentieth century, seeking meaning behind the massacres and mayhem.
Valley of Fire
John Munin is a rational man, a gifted Montreal psychiatrist who believes that the soul and psyche are interesting only in dissection. Even relationships are ripe for analysis, and Munin has identified «six elements that are necessary for love.» His wife, Cynthia, an aspiring artist who paints only self-portraits, remains unconvinced taht love can be so quantified. More susceptible to Munin’s seraching analysis, though, is Penelope, who suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder and is Munin’s star patient. Munin plans to present Penelope’s case at a major medical conference in Nevada. But something has happened to the probing psychiatrist recently, and in the aftermath his orderly world crumbles in the crucible of the desert. Set against the bizarre backdrop of Las Vegas where fate can change unalterably with the turn of a card, Munin is forced to question all of the truths he has held dear. Do events happen due to careful planning or is life just a game of chance? If God played diece with the universe, would he win?