Menalcus Lankford

Re-issued in 2024, this novel tells the story of how an old man, about to be placed in a third rate nursing home by an unsympathetic relative, escapes his hospital room in time to begin a final journey to a dream land of his youth, there to make a dramatic life sacrifice which will benefit those who come after, especially a beloved granddaughter. Subsequent chapters reveal how this plays out as challenge and fulfillment for those touched by the old man’s final act.

This fantasy novel gives a continually inventive, comic and surprising picture of an afterlife for modern readers—specifically the psychological-spiritual-religious trials encountered by well-meaning modern pilgrims to move beyond the stage of admission at the paradise gates and actually reach heaven itself. To do that they must learn to transcend their various Earthly limitations and gain a larger vision of what human life is and could be.

Here they will discover a few animals admitted in the early stages, their own virtual bodies which sniff food for satisfaction but don’t ingest, the pleasing but different sexual acts that come with a virtual body, and famous characters long dead who have their own ideas of what is needed to improve the growing disaster on Earth.

Five thirty-somethings, plus a ninety-one year old man, face challenging and linked turning points in their lives. The cast includes a female environmental activist and her down to Earth roommate, an idealistic but disillusioned ad-man, his rationalistic, law student housemate, and an African-American poet seeking new understanding between big city gritty and his mostly white university. They are all linked to the old man of comically bizarre memories who has just invented a two-way peace pipe of specially blended herbs to be smoked together by adversaries to discover their common humanity in our time of furious divisions.

Romance flourishes between the two sets of roommates, but all are put to the test when the activist is twice kidnapped by a sadistic terrorist, who himself is a casualty of our age of rage. Yet it turns out he’s a complex though blighted individual, which leads to a resolution surprising to all.

Featured here are a vibrant and soul-hungry group living in formerly abandoned, now passionately revived village railway station. These include a sassy, sexy ex-high school teacher seeking a new life while hiding away from her vengeful husband, a boy just out of college looking for something better than being the son of a crude and manipulative billionaire, a salesman desperately promoting a revolutionary invention, and an ironic hunter working for the nearby Gourmoo Choo Choo dinner train. All are under the influence of the “Stationmaster”, who from personal tragedy has developed a photographic memory that has deepened his life but frightens local villagers with what he remembers of their lives. The locals’ fears are further played upon by a company of sinister strangers pushing a fraudulent security system to protect them in their homes, though as several comment “Who is going to protect us from them!”

This novel has it all—the strivings of modern Americans to escape their fears and deepen their lives, the strategies and wild comedy this often entails, the confrontation of commercial fraud, heroism in the face of threatened murder and the promise of going deep into one’s own past memory pictures as a key to a rebirth of purpose in the world.

What isolates individuals in modern life and what does it feel like to be “down the river by yourself”? That’s the broad focus here. More specifically, the novel explores and exposes a common tradition of growing boys into men which often isolates them in this way. By pressuring them to appear tough and invulnerable on the outside, it may turn them into troubled loners on the inside. The summer camp in the novel models this: a one size fits all place where young boys learn that the governing rule is always to “sluff it off”, even heavy bullying and sexual humiliation.

We sense the connection here to the growing domestic violence instigated by angry young men, or their plunge into drug addiction and crime, or at the most extreme the increasing number of terrorists and mass shooters who take out their rage against the society they feel has cheated and humiliated them. Wendell, the hero of the novel, returns as a middle-aged man to try reforming the camp where he suffered this abuse as a twelve year old. There he finds a modern boy of that same age undergoing the same torment and attempts to rescue him—with a desperation born of his powerful identification with him. In the process he also tries to save the twenty-year-old who has joined down river with the boy, becoming a terrorist threatening the community where Wendell lives and woman whom he loves.

A young woman of 24 returns to her small hometown at the sudden death of her beloved father, her last living parent. Following the funeral, she becomes aware of a long lost uncle — almost equally an important influence in her childhood. Tracking him down, she finds he has become a ruthless and dishonest mortgage broker, twice divorced now and doing his part in worsening the mortgage crisis that led to the worldwide recession of 2008. She begins a secret campaign, using her childhood knowledge of him, to reach the man he once was — at the same time moving into a colorful inner city rowhouse and beginning to investigate and help in the local housing crisis. In doing so, she strives to become what her father wished for her — a woman of action.

The stories in this collection are “modern fairy tales for grown-ups”. They use elements that still haunt our memories from the wonderful childhood stories by Grimm, Anderson, Carroll, Perrault, Barrie, Baum, Stoker and others to confront the strangeness of our own times: motifs of the fairy godmother, the frog and the prince, witches, trolls, Cinderella letting down her hair, a displaced Transylvanian—all become challenges and inspirations for modern characters.