Owen & Dolores
a sketch
by David J. Keffer
Short Description:
Poison Pie, Man of the Mushroom People, is an entity that encourages ambiguity in all things, including his own origin.
Over the years, a variety of obviously contradictory explanations have been provided in several forms,
including a short story (The Ridiculously Sad Sasquatch) and several different illustrated stories (for example, Stairs Going Nowhere).
"Owen & Dolores" is a novel that provides yet another variation on the tale,
certainly the longest and most detailed and
no more consistent with any of the previous origins than any of them were with each other.
It is a novel of sparse, stark language, free of the narrator's inference.
Long Description:
The novel, "Owen and Dolores", describes the relationship between a brother and a sister, raised in rural Tennessee.
As children, Owen and Dolores are inseparable, supporting each other through their father’s death and their mother’s distance.
At eighteen, Owen abruptly leaves home with aspirations of discovering the world beyond.
Dolores, four years his junior, is left behind, feeling abandoned.
After an absence of eleven years, during which time Dolores has given up Owen for dead,
she gets word that her brother has returned to East Tennessee.
Strangely, Owen makes no attempt to contact her.
Dolores then begins a search for her brother, trying to unravel the intertwined mysteries of why he refuses to see her
and who he has become during his long absence.
During Dolores' search for her brother, she enters unfamiliar domains of Knoxville, Tennessee and other parts of East Tennessee,
exposing herself to a variety of unsavory risks only because of her devotion to her brother and her determination to find him.
From the Back Cover:
"Owen & Dolores" is subtitled "a sketch", because the information that is recorded in this novel contains only the most superficial elements of the story, a skeletal narrative. It completely lacks the essential, motivating elements that drove the author to write it in the first place.
This book exists. Its value lies in a reluctance to condemn to oblivion the countless other unrealized alternatives, which do not exist beyond vague intimations hidden between the lines in this book because the author chose, poorly or otherwise, to exert his finite time and energy on this particular work.
That a reader should devote some few hours of their time to reading such a testament is only modestly unfortunate, since, of course, there are many much less productive ways to pass the hours of the day.
Length: 82,000 words (196 pages in paperback)
written: September-December, 2000, Knoxville, Tennessee
Status: This novel remains unpublished.
poison pie publishing house catalog number: PP-038-N
