Songs of the Maniacs

From her office at a mental health institute on the outskirts of modern day Miami, a troubled young woman counsels deeply disturbed clients while coping with her own heightening concerns. These include frightening consciousness lapses, violent memories of a high school sexual relationship, a menacing stalker, and an annoyingly arousing visitor who may or may not be insane. All this on a single stormy day as SIPD, today's flavor of mental health disorder, threatens to distort memory and identity, unmooring the validity of reality itself.

In stark, lyrical prose, Songs of the Maniacs shares a young woman's search for illumination as she attempts to understand her past, present, and true self. When she allows herself to take a deeper look at the people and events that make up her life as a counselor for the insane, she is drawn into the hallucinogenic reality her clients are struggling to control. The hypnotic pull of the story lies in the mystery of the storyteller herself and her murky, uneasy sense of doom. Her world is a wounded one, but familiar and uncomfortably close to our own.

A seductive and chilling short novel, Songs of the Maniacs relies on clear prose and uncluttered imagery to delineate a fascinating descent into the abyss beneath the lush tropical surfaces of contemporary American paradise.