FLOREAT LUX
FLOREAT LUX
The Devil is to publish an apologia, for which he needs the assistance of a sharp legal mind.
A contemporary literary novel, available now
Cover Art
Front Jacket
Front Cover
Back Jacket
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The Story
Sabrina Lancaster is completing a doctorate at NYU Law School. The subject of her dissertation is the opinions of Mariano Scaglietti, a Supreme Court Justice famed as much for his acerbity as his intellect. After the Justice’s sudden death the estate hires Sabrina to catalog his papers, and among them she discovers the draft of a letter, a disturbing one. The intended recipient is a wealthy recluse, Aneurin Bronaryre, whose London-based lawyer reveals that, among other idiosyncrasies, his client believes himself to be the Devil.
The Devil in this case is an urbane Englishman who, although physically in his thirties, claims to have come into his current incarnation in the Seventeenth Century, and whose earliest memory as a young boy is witnessing the execution of Charles I, where Cromwell supposedly gave him a coin, the same ‘Oxford Crown’ currently in the Ashmolean Museum—an object he covets. He purportedly came to self-understanding through expulsion from Oxford, incarceration in the Tower, and the poetry of John Milton. His motives for having decided to defend himself in print are unclear.
Sabrina is unsure whether this is some sort of total immersion technique—a writer’s version of the actor’s Stanislavski method—or if Bronaryre is simply delusional, but she accepts a position as the Devil’s amanuensis, and so begins a journey, both real and psychological, taking her from the New World to the Old: part Grand Guignol masque; part Alice-in-Wonderland fairy tale; part psychedelic phantasmagoria.
Meanwhile, the Devil tells his tale.
“Alice in Wonderland on acid“
“Brace displays such eloquence and such a firm control of pacing…artful coup de grace…an intriguing and multilayered supernatural thriller.”
KIRKUS REVIEWS
“a wild, complex novel that blurs the line between the real and the supernatural…a psychedelic trip through literature, history and art.”
BLUE INK REVIEWS
“a cosmological search…literary and rhetorical…a theatrical celebration of what like minds can accomplish.”
FOREWORD CLARION REVIEWS
Hardcover, 548 pages