A Journey from Purgatory to Armageddon
by
After his last breath, Joseph awakens in a desolate world of dust and darkness, a timeless wasteland of fragmented memories. As he slowly tries to piece together the haunting, beautiful, and heartbreaking fragments of the family and life he left behind, he bears witness to the final, cosmic battle between Heaven and Hell. A visionary, spiritual journey into the afterlife in the tradition of Dante and C.S. Lewis, The Book of Joseph is a fusion of apocalyptic fiction, literary spiritual fantasy, metaphysical-visionary fiction, and epic prose-poetry. At once intimate and cosmic, the book invites the reader on a journey through life after death, a meditation on the power of memory, suffering, hope, love, and redemption, and a desperate father’s desire to reunite with his family at the end of time.
In this debut novella, the author draws upon his own memories, his research into the Great War, and his Acadian, Irish, and Welsh roots to explore the landscape of spiritual survival and human memory.
I drift and drift, along a salient line of lethal singularity, into the abyss...
There is a blackness here. I can’t feel my soul. I can’t remember who I am. A cold emptiness enters my heart, with no escape. Against my will, I shuffle forward in the near darkness and dust, moving endlessly on a sea of freezing sand, bare feet aching on the dry, hard ground. There is no horizon, no water, no shade, no rest...
Shadows of disjointed spirits appear and fade in the distance. I try to call out but have no voice. They are too far away to touch. After what seems like many years, a singular soul is near me. I feel her memory of a little girl playing with a blue plastic tea set, talking to an imaginary friend, smiling. The confusion of her spirit passes through me as she disappears into the thick dust.