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Reviews

A tortured author meets a tragic end.
In this novel within a novel, Ekemar tells multiple stories. An editor, who helped Paul Crimson publish his successful first novel based on his experiences in the Vietnam War, gets the author's papers after his untimely death from a drug overdose. Crimson's life and work rewind via his diaries and chapters of his unpublished second novel, The Ship. The novelist moves to the tiny coastal village of Harbor, Maine, to escape a dissolute life in Las Vegas and buckle down to writing his second novel. In The Ship, three Arctic researchers get stuck in a blizzard after their van breaks down but find their way to an icebound ship nearby. The seven men on board turn out to be a horde of degenerate rogues ... Back in Maine, Crimson falls in love with his married landlady, Inocencia, a Colombian immigrant, but discovers she's having an affair with her neighbor. Flashing back to the mayhem of the Vietnam War, Crimson kills the couple, but Inocencia's brother Xavier, a cocaine dealer, is wrongfully convicted of the crime. After Crimson dies of a drug overdose in Miami at age 25, his guilt becomes clear to his editor through his diaries.
This richly textured novel evokes a smothering, claustrophobic atmosphere of evil and events spinning out of control in all its settings. Crimson's three lives--his past in Vietnam, his present in Maine, and his fictional world in the Arctic--create a revealing portrait of a tortured soul.
This novel delivers a spooky and readable yarn. - Kirkus Reviews

Author Biography

I've been fortunate with opportunities to travel the world, counting Mexico, France, Sweden and Spain as my home at one time or other. In the past, a good part of my life was dedicated to business ventures: an art gallery, an advertising agency and commodity trading, among others. 

My travels have taken me to faraway places and amazing situations. I arrived in Mongolia just as the revolution for independence from the USSR started. I have been taken up the Sepik river by crocodile hunters in Papua Guinea. I’ve climbed Mount Kilimanjaro in Kenya, gone horseback riding to where the Río Magdalena in Colombia begins, crossed the Australian desert, hiked the Inka trail the wrong direction in Peru, and much more. However, the experience with the most impact that I’ve lived through was to be arbitrarily jailed in a centre for torture in Paraguay during the Stroessner dictatorship, under the absurd accusation of being a terrorist.

During the past two decades, I've been focused on artistic expressions – painting, photography, design and architecture, but mainly on writing. The sources for the things I'm interested in writing about are the passions of people; places and customs that I've experienced around the world; and stories or situations from life that intrigue me. However, I'm convinced that none of the aforementioned is enough to create a work of literature (or any kind of artwork, for that matter), unless it's supported by a strong, fundamental idea. 

My interests are centred around languages, music, travelling to extraordinary places, and all visual arts. These elements, I believe, occupy a large place in what I write. Moreover, I perceive my literary work easy to visualise because of them.