Synopsis

It’s 1978, and the art scene in the Midwest is booming. Successful Detroit gallery owner Fairchild Moss secretly yearns to return to his first love, painting. When he comes into possession of a mysterious masterpiece, his life takes an unexpected turn. Perplexed by the imprint of a nipple in the thick paint, Moss is determined to unravel the painting’s mystery. So begins a darkly comic quest to uncover the story behind the eerie masterpiece and to locate the elusive muse who inspired it.

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Praise

“A page-turning thriller, a meditation on art, and a touching exploration of second chances, Peter Gooch’s Seren is a novel that does all that.” — Adam Prince, author of The Beautiful Wishes of Ugly Men

“Seren is at once a sharply comic satire of the art scene, a canny meditation on the nature of art, and an entirely absorbing murder mystery. — Arnold Johnston, novelist, playwright, poet, and author of Swept Away, The Witching Voice and Where We’re Going, Where We’ve Been

“This novel skewers the pretensions and infighting of the art world in the context of a thoroughly satisfying mystery that will make readers laugh and think.” — Deborah Ann Percy, fiction writer, playwright, and author of Invisible Traffic and Dream Time (Susan Smith Blackburn Award Finalist)

“Seren is a tour de force. Rooted in an archetypal battle between darkness and light, the plot line quivers with energy and mystery.” — Phaedra Greenwood, author of Beside the Rio Hondo and coauthor of Those Were the Days: Life and Love in 1970s New Mexico 

Excerpt

PROLOGUE

Detroit—January 1978

Cass Avenue. Wind rattles windowpanes in the old, redbrick warehouse, the clouded squares of glass loose in their wooden frames, caulk chipped and crumbling. Outside, snow is building up,  obscuring the shapes of the stoops, the fire hydrants, the benches at bus stops. Rumors of the  Nain Rouge abound. This blizzard has ambushed the Motor City—a place so derelict and impoverished since the 1967 riots it’s unready for any sort of challenge, much less the snowstorm of the century. The plows have surrendered. The streets and highways lie under four foot drifts. In the yellow glow of streetlights, flakes cascade relentlessly from the heavens,  signifying nothing less than the hand of God.

Inside the painting studio, electric heaters crackle, glowing orange and hot. The smell of turpentine, cigarette smoke, and urine saturates the air. There is no orthodox ventilation—chinks  in the building’s mortar do the trick.

Haller bends over the turntable and repositions the needle at the beginning of the track.  Fauré’s “Élégie for Cello” drones from speakers positioned around the room. Clouds of mauve, violet, and viridian fog the space. He has played the same piece all night. He’ll listen until he is too exhausted or too drunk to lift the phonograph needle.

Seren no longer hears much of anything but the sound of her own breathing. Her job is to lie naked and let Haller look at her. Nothing more. Hours ago, she entered the dark tunnel of semiconsciousness. Her respiration is slow and shallow, heart pumping at a rate of fifty beats per minute. Inert on the filthy mattress, she’s discarded all sense of time. The scene passing before her eyes flickers like an old film from the 1920s, images ratcheting through a cracked projector lens. Haller moves around the studio in a jerky motion of starts and stops. He’s dressed in bib overalls, a soiled singlet, and yellow work boots with dangling laces, his bald head bent on a neck too skinny to bear its weight, heavy-lobed ears standing straight out and lending him the aspect of a startled baby elephant. A paint-stained rag hangs from a rear pocket.

As if from a great distance comes pounding on the metal door. Haller ignores the intrusive sound and tends instead to the mixing of a new color on a huge glass palette caked with decades of dried paint along its edges. The banging continues until he can stand it no more. He throws down his brushes and painting knives in disgust.

The heavy door screeches open on its balky track. A gust of freezing air carries voices  into the room. At first Haller’s tone is sharp, strident, complaining, then it levels out. Seren  doesn’t recognize the other voices, but few in Detroit matter to her aside from Haller, the man  who pays her.

Figures appear, pushing past the makeshift curtain hung just inside the door to block the cold. Two old men enter, trailed by the diminutive artist who is looking peeved by the invasion.  One of the men is enormously tall and gaunt, stooped at the waist from years of toil. The other man, wearing a dirty cap over wisps of white hair, glows with the aura of a saint. He is the American painter, Norris Bainbridge.

A rumble of conversation pierced by sarcastic laughter washes over her. She commences emerging into full consciousness. “That’s Seren,” Haller says to the men, waving his hand dismissively in her direction. “She’s my best girl.”

The tall man glances her way, nods slightly, and receives a glass filled with whisky from  Haller. They collapse into armchairs. Music plays. Electric heaters snap and buzz. Outside, the wind wreaks havoc on the world. The saint approaches the dais, moving toward her like a wounded stork—each footfall seemingly rife with hazard. Grizzled beard, bushy eyebrows,  furtive, unforgiving eyes. He bends to look at her, his gaze traveling over her naked body, up and down and back again, nostrils flaring when he picks up her scent. He mutters something in a voice too faint to hear.

The old man’s thoughts take shape in her mind. Images gradually infiltrate the capillaries of her brain. She waits for him to recognize her. With agonizing slowness, she fills her lungs and widens her eyes, willing ordinary life back into her body. Bainbridge’s weathered features cloud as if he’s attempting to grasp the tail of something that remains just out of reach.

Then, nothing. His aging blue eyes glaze over and grow distant. His spirit has moved to  another place—lost in the past. A picture of a battered, white chair surrounded by the dense  green of vegetation in twilight floats before her eyes. The old painter’s recollections wash  through her like the first rush of heroin. The blush of new love.

Seren smells earth, rich with summer—the sweetness of honeysuckle. A weathered barn,  shadowed under willow trees, a rain barrel, and a pair of sawhorses. She knows this place. He brushes her cheek with the back of his hand. “Do yourself a favor, Mouse, don’t fuck  that limey bastard.” His words carry the inflection of a benediction. The expression on his face tells her he knows it’s already too late.

She doesn’t respond to her childhood nickname. Instead, the vision dissolves and is  replaced with the scene of an ice-rimmed river, a black pine forest under a brilliant yellow sky.  At the edge of a tumbled deadfall, two crows pick at a rag of skin on frozen ground.

In the studio, there is more talk, more whisky, voices rising, shouting back and forth. The smell of bitterness and resignation permeates the room. Then Bainbridge—fool, saint, painter of landscapes—pulls on his jacket and hobbles out.

Laughter. Haller brays like a donkey. Fauré plays over and over on the phonograph. Seren snatches up her heavy wool coat and follows the old man into the blizzard.  Whatever befalls him, she wants to be there—to lap up the remaining moments of his life with her wet, pink tongue.

About the Author

Peter Gooch is a painter, writer, and former art professor living in New Mexico. He is the winner of the Bosque Publishing Prize for Fiction, and his short fiction has appeared in numerous literary magazines and online including The New Guard, Bosque Publishing, Etched Onyx, and Light and Dark Literary Magazine. Originally from Ann Arbor, Michigan, he holds an MFA from Western Michigan University. He resides in Corrales with his wife, Dr. Sharon Ransom.

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