<p>The story of Michael, a professor of Comparative Literature who is beginning to suspect that his wife, Christine, an ex-student some 20 years his junior, is harboring dark secrets about her past.</p>
<p>To uncover these secrets, he teams up with Christine's psychologist, and the two use deception to find out about her mysterious past, which is personified by her even more mysterious father, whose ghost-like presence is felt throughout the novel. In the climactic scene of Lovers Living, Lovers Dead, Michael raids his wife's secret hope chest, finding out that Christine's "wild stories" about her father's trips to Africa and the Far East, where he consorted with "witch doctors" and tribal chieftains, were not tales after all, but realities. He finds millions in Swiss bank accounts, and pornographic pictures of his wife being molested as a child (so that she could not be sacrificed as a virgin). As it turns out, Christine's father struck a deal with the devil as it were, one in which he delivered his daughter's soul in order to save her from becoming a human sacrifice.</p>

Lovers Living, Lovers Dead

Richard Lortz

Dell Publishing

Literature & Fiction

Corgi

"Mother Who Lost Son Seeks Son Who Has Lost Mother," read the advertisement in The Village Voice.Those who replied, the curious, the disturbed, the opportunistic were writing to Mrs. Harrington-Smith Evans, one of the ten wealthiest women in the world whose only child, a teenage boy, had died a mysterious death.Pretentious, theatrical, wantonly self-dramatized, increasingly deranged in her grief, Mrs. Evans indulges in all the extravagant expressions of bereavement that money can buy: a seamless glass coffin; an embalming secret the pharaohs of ancient Egypt must have dreamed of; and a tomb so costly and exquisite, Shan Jahan's ghost surely groaned in its envy.Finally, the ad: in retrospect so silly and embarrassing she needn't kill herself to die. But if she found him, a surrogate son might ease her grief, forestall her encroaching madness.From the many respondents, her choice narrows down to three: Angel, an illiterate boy from New York's Spanish ghetto; Martin, a handsome, fatally ambitious young actor; and disarming Bruno, barely eighteen, an aspiring novelist who writes her perfumed letters in an absurd 19th century prose.The Rivalries, the passions, the bizarre events that follow this strange entourage include murder, suicide, and a "haunting" like no other in this world or the next.As he did in Lovers Living Lovers Dead, the author, tongue-in-cheek, mixes "comedy and ancient terror" in a lyrically layered style that critics call "a frightening lightness of tone...as eerie as the plot itself." But Bereavements also has its serious side. As its final pages chill us with the supernatural-as-metaphor, it is clear we are nearing the end of an extraordinary love story: one not eros but agapeone that distinguishes movingly between a love that is love, and a love that is Love.

Bereavements

Poetry

Permanent Press

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