Author(s): Edward Carl Stephens

Rare, Collectable, Folios | Fiction - General

Picture it: You are Paxton Quigley and you are gradually but inexorably being seduced to death. You are the Quig, native of Connecticut and bedrooms, an expert on Kierkegaard and contraception, but you are being cut down in your prime by a trio of vengeful, tireless young women. You are the Pax, known as Williams College's highest scoring stud but, brother, you have just about had the course. All you did was to offer your affectionate services simultaneously to three of Bennington College's loveliest young wenches, without telling each about the others. And who, given the opportunity, wouldn't?

Al Loam is anxious—with a capital 'A' for Angst: anxious about his sex life, his family life, his business life, his whole life. He has reached a point of such nearly total frustration that his suppressed desires erupt in a Walter Mitty torrent of erotic day-dreams.

Loam, the tragi-comic hero of this novel, is employed by Missionary Mills of New York, in charge of their Krispie Krunchie breakfast cereal account, where his entire day is spent re-arranging the contents of his in and out trays, drinking greasy coffee, eating hugely and secretly, and complaining about the pressures and exigencies of executive life in the Big City. When he returns home at night, full of the important business he has enacted in his fantasies during the day and full of thoughts of the voluptuous secretarial force in the office and of the women he has passed on the street, he has one thing on his mind. His wife has one thing on her mind: to get dinner on the table and the dishes washed. Overwhelmed by frustrated potency, Loam wreaks his revenge by attacking and demolishing the food in front of him, to spend the evening illuminated by the ghostly glow of the television screen, bereft of gastric calm, and threatened but never compromised by the papers in the attache case waiting at his feet like a faithful dog.

His sexual fantasies remain purely of his mind until he meets Miss Vivian Biltmore, queen of the blue movies, who in return for a favour from Loam, volunteers one of her own...

Al Loam, bored, lonely and misunderstood, his protuberant paunch giving a false impression of success and solidarity, is a sad, lovable, pathetic and intensely comic figure, and A Turn in the Dark Wood is a sexy and painfully funny satire of contemporary American society.

Secondhand. Fair condition, spine is starting to split inside front cover and some whitout over what appears to be the name of the orriginal owner in several places.