Anastasia’s Midnight Song follows from an idea book that I kept during my senior year of high school, fall of 1986-spring 1987. And it’s no surprise why Anastasia’s Midnight Song would end up trafficking in the juxtaposition of adolescence and the presence of evil: all of my time that senior year was divided between high school and countless journeys into the dodgy city—San Francisco.
In retrospect, there was nothing all that unusual about a depressed teenager in Contra Costa County taking the BART into the big city. Usually, though, the stereotypical depressed teenager would be going into either San Francisco or Berkeley so as to rendezvous with various questionable contacts. And, of course, many a depressed teenager takes his final trip into the city so as to hurl himself or herself off Golden Gate Bridge. That happens often enough.
By contrast, my tale seems so much more innocuous: my teenage depression had grown so severe that my parents had begun making me travel into the city each afternoon to see a therapist. The whole experience did tend to be rather mundane. While looking for a taxicab to take me to the therapist’s office, plenty of prostitutes and demented homeless people might walk by—but then the taxicab would take me straight to the therapist’s door, and that was that.
Despite all of the aforementioned, the glimpse into the city life gave me more than enough curiosity regarding the presence of evil, madness, crime, and psychopathy. And the contrast between the relative placidity of Contra Costa County and the perils of city life filled that journal and idea book with a longing to find the perfect setting in which to write a coming-of-age tale like no other that had ever been written—a tale something like A Separate Peace meets Tess of the d’Urbervilles meets Red Dragon. (Bear in mind Silence of the Lambs had not been published yet.)
So, what is Anastasia’s Midnight Song about? The answer depends upon which one of the two principal characters you were to ask. And given the fact that my teenage journals and idea books juxtaposed Contra Costa County with the rough-and-tumble city, it was always a foregone conclusion that the book that followed from those journals would be divided between two point-of-view characters.
According to the young lady, Anastasia, it’s a story about how a woman must confront and overcome misogyny and/or sexual harassment.
According to the depressed and temporarily demented young man, Jack, it’s a love story in which he must surely be perfect for her. Like a demented Don Quixote, Jack might even say it’s a story about committing to the goal of destroying evil—and a story about committing to the goal of winning the hand of a beautiful young lady. Suffice it to say, Jack would not necessarily understand that he himself presented the actual peril all along.
In a sense, Anastasia’s Midnight Song is a beauty-and-the-beast story. Nevertheless, neither beauty nor beast can adequately agree on the details. Still, isn’t that the way a coming-of-age story ought to be? Adolescence is a time for breaking away, a time of division. And shouldn’t a coming-of-age tale seek to capture that instability?
(Note to future readers: you ought to know that the concept of hypnotherapy will fall into a state of obsolescence one day. In time, science and medicine will find a cure for depression, dementia, psychopathy, and most forms of stress—and the cure will come by combining gene therapy with some or other therapy involving the stabilizing of one’s biochemistry itself.)
M. Laszlo lives in Bath Township, Ohio. He is an aging recluse, rarely seen nor heard. Anastasia’s Midnight Song is his second release with AIA Publishing.
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