ANASTASIA'S MIDNIGHT SONG
by
M. Laszlo
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Psychological
drama
Publication Date: November 10, 2024
Page count: 343 pages
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SYNOPSIS:
Longing
to cure her deep, hysterical fears involving a diabolical dream fox living
inside her womb, Anastasia T. Grace takes a post making occult mirrors in the
hope that she may someday convince herself that she commands the power to
banish her nemesis into one of her creations. However, when a troubled, young
Englishman grows obsessed with her beauty, she is forced to confront the
pressing, all-too-real, misogynistic danger of male psychopathy.
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ENJOY AN EXCERPT:
Saint
Petersburg, Russia. 27 August, 1917.
At dusk,
Anastasia T. Grace collected the urn containing her mother’s ashes and brought
the vessel to Moskovsky Prospekt Railway Station. ‘The cremation services went
well,’ Anastasia whispered, holding the urn close. ‘You’ve been purified by
fire, and now I’m taking you to be blessed by water. Baptised. Yes, Mama, I’ll
sprinkle your remains all about the Arkhangelsk shore.’
A memory of
their first journey to the White Sea whirled Anastasia back to the past—that
time her mother had described Arkhangelsk as a harbour town. And in the days of
1907, that was all it was.
So, why did we
travel there? A lady from the House of Fabergé asked Mama to meet a steamship
out of Reykjavík. Yes, Mama aimed to collect a consignment of volcanic glass.
The hissing and
shunting of the train brought her back to the present. It’s 1917. Clutching the
urn containing Mother’s ashes, she pulled herself up into the train. Then she
edged along the narrow passage and slid into the sleeping car. She placed the
urn beside the bed.
With a rumbling
of the wheels and a piercing whistle, the train set off on the long journey to
Arkhangelsk.
Late in the
night, as the train approached a deserted outpost and clanked over a section of
the line lacking proper railway ties, Anastasia jerked awake. Sitting up, she
looked to her lap and revisited that first journey, a decade ago, that moment
the engineer had jammed on the brake and she’d been shaken awake as she had
just now. What happened that night?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
M.
Laszlo is the pseudonym of a reclusive author living in Bath, Ohio. According
to rumor, he based the pen name on the name of the Paul Henreid character in
Casablanca, Victor Laszlo.
M.
Laszlo has lived and worked all over the world, and he has kept exhaustive
journals and idea books corresponding to each location and post.
It
is said that the maniacal habit began in childhood during summer vacations—when
his family began renting out Robert Lowell’s family home in Castine, Maine.
The
habit continued into the 1990s when he lived in the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem
and worked as a night clerk in a Palestinian youth hostel. In recent years, he
revisited that very journal/idea book and based Anastasia’s Midnight Song on
the characters, topics, and themes contained within the writings.
M.
Laszlo has lived and worked in New York City, East Jerusalem, and several other
cities around the world. While living in the Middle East, he worked for Harvard
University’s Semitic Museum. He holds a bachelor’s degree in English from Hiram
College in Hiram, Ohio and an M.F.A. in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College in
Bronxville, New York.
REVIEW:
4 stars!
An atmospheric and complicated tale of madness set at the
time of WWI.
Anastasia’s Midnight Song by M. Laszlo is not a
comfortable, easy book to read, yet it is riveting all the same. Told from the
perspectives of the two main characters, Anastasia and Jack, I was mesmerized
by what they were going through and kept off-balance by the fluidity of reality
and fantasy. I turned the pages, hoping they each would find their way to peace
and freedom from their hallucinations and depressions, but was unsettled by their
ensuing descent further into their madnesses.
The story’s settings are unusual, and the events of the time
contribute to the characters’ problems. The author’s descriptions of 1917 St. Petersburg
and the Sinai create a palpably heavy atmosphere that I felt I was constantly wading
through alongside the characters.
As the story unfolded, reality and Anastasia’s hallucinatory
interactions with the arctic fox and Svetlana often merged, and I was uncertain
what she was really experiencing, if there was still some reality at work. I also
felt Jack’s fear of going to war was well-founded. His childhood ill-prepared
him both mentally and physically for life in general; he was delusional as to his
skills and future already, and a wartime posting would have been certain death,
especially considering the transition the mechanics of war were undergoing
during WWI. Still, his cowardice and inability to join in the conflict preyed
on his mind with tragic results.
With its character-driven plot and atmospheric imagery, I
recommend ANASTASIA’S MIDNIGHT SONG to readers of literary fiction.
GIVEAWAY! GIVEAWAY! GIVEAWAY!
M.
Laszlo will be awarding a $20 Amazon/BN gift card to a randomly drawn winner.
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