Spirit Lake, a new novel by Ben Dolan
Available June 9, 2025
JP Stone is a has-been “bot-poet” and a disgruntled academic coasting into a rather bleak retirement in his secluded quarters in an Albuquerque high rise. He was in love once, briefly. He was married once, much later and regrettably less briefly. Now he wages silent, psychological warfare against the concierge of his rather ridiculous, drone-friendly apartment building. He remains oddly alert to the comings and goings of his Hungarian neighbors. He has a strained relationship with his self-driving car, though self-driving cars made what little success he saw in his academic career. His magnum opus, Bot-Poetics, certainly did not. Even Daniel Glidden, his department head, once collaborator, and former friend, has given up trying to coax JP out of his silent fortress.
But then a stranger comes to town. She asks to meet him, but he knows what she really desires: she wants to ask a difficult question. But she needn’t meet him to know the answer. The answer is no. He has proof. Spirit Lake is his proof, his rude greeting, his disavowal, and his strange goodbye.
Darkly Bright Press is pleased to present Ben Dolan’s debut novel, an elegiac confrontation between a man and his tragic past. In this complex character study, the author explores the borderlands which superficially divide poetry, technology and mysticism. Stone is a hunted man on the run to the scorched mountainsides of the Southwest where the veil between this world and the next is ghostly thin.
NEW POETRY
Atrophy by Joshua Alan Sturgill
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