The Card by George Seaton

Title:The Card

Author: George Seaton

Cover Artist: Deanna C. Jamroz

Publisher: MLR

Genre: memoir (memoir-ish?)

Length: 7000 words

The dynamic between fathers and sons is complex, most often least understood by the players themselves. But is it the father who does not know his son, or is it the son who does not know his father?

The discovery of a Father's Day card in a box---long ago shoved into a dark corner in a cellar---provides a revelation to a son, a gay son that shatters all previous conclusions about his father. Set in Denver, the ravages of a massive flood, and the disappearance of a nine-year-old girl, provide the background for a son's coming of age, and a father's eerie ability to "...read the hunch...," that is essential to his prowess as a cop.

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If this story isn’t a true event in author George Seaton’s life, it really feels like it—this story ranges from present day to back in time, back and forth, with stories and details that feel absolutely real.

The narrator’s father—he never outright claims to be George—is a Denver cop, and his abilities to solve cases and intervene in crises border on the uncanny. The father showed his abilities in incidents during the  1965 South Platte Flood that devastated Denver (there are still buildings with high-water marks showing) and also in a crime involving young Anne Marie Canino. The narrative isn’t linear at all—it jumps around from one detail to another, and then to present day, as the narrator considers this Father’s Day card, the only one he ever gave, and which he’s felt compelled to keep.

The story has the feel of an evening’s chat, maybe as if the narrator were sharing a comfortable sofa and a glass of whiskey with the reader, reminiscing about his youth and how he felt about his old man: unapproachable, often silent, more often absent, but still the lodestone of the family. The son knows his father’s  cases better than he knows the man, and each time he comes back to talk about this greeting card, the mixed feelings come through, and every time he talks about the past, a little more of both the father and the son come through. The son fears that he doesn’t measure up to expectations, and maybe that the father has detected too much at home.

There isn’t a romance element here exactly, although a teenage companion helps with early experiments. The narrator’s long term partner appears now and then, to tease about dragging boxes of keepsakes from home to home, repackaging when the cartons fall apart but seldom peeking inside. It takes his different perspective to see what the narrator might have found for himself long ago.

And that’s what will put the tear-prickles in your eyes. 4 marbles
 

A Blog Hop Excerpt by George Seaton

The Card
Fathers Day 2012 Release
By George Seaton

The dynamic between fathers and sons is complex, most often least understood by the players themselves. But is it the father who does not know his son, or is it the son who does not know his father?

The discovery of a Father's Day card in a box---long ago shoved into a dark corner in a cellar---provides a revelation to a son, a gay son that shatters all previous conclusions about his father. Set in Denver, the ravages of a massive flood, and the disappearance of a nine-year-old girl, provide the background for a son's coming of age, and a father's eerie ability to "...read the hunch...," that is essential to his prowess as a cop.

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I am looking at it now. It is an unremarkable card from the folks at Hallmark. It is mostly cream-colored, with a textured gold-colored ribbon surrounding the sentiment and drawing on the front. The sentiment reads, “To the best father in the world.” The drawing provides a briar pipe—quite simple in its design—resting in an ashtray on a round tabletop with a thin spiral of white smoke coming from a small red glow within the innards of the pipe’s bowl. A pair of leather gloves lay next to the ashtray. I do not know why this particular card captured my interest then, so many years ago. Then again, perhaps I do. I wonder at the symbolism of the drawing, especially the leather gloves. But even now I smell the delicious aroma of the tobacco mix (a tinge of vanilla), and I know the gloves would smell just as lovely if I could pick them up and cradle them against my nose. Maybe that was it. Maybe the image on the face of the card just impressed me as something the best father in the world would have on his side table. And, yes, perhaps the best father in the world would live on a wooded drive, in a two or three-story farmhouse in Vermont or Maine. Perhaps he and his son would walk the woods of ancient oak—the trails layered with the colors of fall—along with their three or four Irish Setters, and trade thoughts about life and living and the future. And, as the day began to fade and the wind picked up, they would walk back to the warm inviting farmhouse, the father’s hand upon the son’s shoulder.

My father smoked fat cigars. A large tumbler of scotch/water invariably sat next to his ashtray on the side table next to his—and only his—recliner; a large leather chair that sputtered a complaint when he first sat down and creaked whenever he stretched to retrieve his scotch or cigar from the side table. We, my mother and I, lived with my father in a ranch-style house in southwest Denver, with a backyard fenced-in by chain link that corralled a black, brown and white dog of indeterminate lineage; our trees were modest, bushes really. Our lives, unfortunately, did not conform to the pleasant world evoked by Hallmark.

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Coming on Father's Day (June 17) from MLR Press!

Find George's news and tidbits at here at his blog, and there's a review to his gothic romance, Finding Deaglan, somewhere around here, which is set in Colorado. I think the Byers-Evans House was part of the setting.

Finding Deaglan by George Seaton

Finding Deaglan by George Seaton
Publisher: MRL Press
Genre: Contemporary, M/M
Length: 457 pages


A coterie of inheritors of Denver's old money, including twenty-four year old Stephen Thaxton, find themselves inextricably entwined in an imperative to close a hoary circle left open in the other world, the other side where retribution is sought for wrongs committed by their progenitors a century before; wrongs that eradicated wolves from Colorado, and saw the indigenous Indian tribes of Colorado robbed of their lands, all to enhance the wealth and privilege of those who now find themselves the last of their family lines.

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Finding Deaglan is a big, sweeping novel, ranging a hundred and more years through time, involving many of the leading families of Denver. Fortunes were dragged out of the mountains, grave injustices done, and now George Seaton spins a Gothic yarn to right some part of the damage.


The ensemble cast features the last scions of many of Denver's leading families, which made their fortunes in ways both fair and foul. A hundred years removed from the original crimes, the author makes sure we know these are much nicer people, who right wrongs, do business honestly, and bounce small children on their knees, but they are still expected to pay for crimes that echo through time. What happened in the historical massacre Seaton invokes and in the deliberate slaughter of the wolves was awful, but horror on horror has to be added to the ancestral crimes, until we are sure their hearts were so evil that their sins ought to be visited unto the seventh generation, except that the families are ending a few generations short.

The most interesting characters are Merriweather, the psychic who interprets the paranormal goings on, Tasha, the young Native American woman who has been trained by her grandfather, Two Looks, in the old ways, Two Looks, who is still quite spry for being a hundred years old, and Mobley, the irascible lawyer who is unfortunately not given his worthy opponent. The other voices tend to blend together. They, with Deaglan, the mysterious baby, have a task to complete on behalf of the spirits: wolf, human, and Wolf. The paranormal elements are only understood by a few; it remains an open question precisely what they accomplish.

This story was a learning experience – I hit the dictionary several times. Some of the text is luminous:

Trummel looked up, smiled into the exquisite blue of the April sky that hovered just above the tops of the tallest of those Seventeenth Street edifices where the rich, no, the extremely wealthy did their deals and perhaps cavorted with the devil as they counted their millions.

Some is just long: sentences with four actions and two descriptions each aren't uncommon, and every single motion is important enough to mention. Every small step of preparing a cup of coffee, for example, isn't that fascinating. A stronger editorial hand could have trimmed the irrelevant, redirected an off-the-wall subplot with Finster and Mobley into something that connected better with the main story, and softened some black-and-white ancestral issues into less heavy-handed and more interesting shades of gray.

Finding Deaglan has some wonderful scenes and some true horror; readers looking for a pure romance story will not be happy here, but those who want a paranormal with gay characters will find something to enjoy. 3 Marbles