Think Kafka, Calvino, Rushdie, and Coehlo. Now add Richard Beeson and his debut novel, Seduction of a Wanton Dreamer, a mythic tale that blends tongue-in-cheek humor with a serious exploration of our history, psychology, sexuality, spirituality, and our place in the multiverse. When an ancient Celtic god, Lugh of the Long Hand, decides to recapture his earthly power, he targets an unsuspecting New Yorker, Tony Fellows, as his contemporary messiah. By infiltrating Tony's dreams, orchestrating a series of personal crises, and steering him into a barrage of sexual and spiritual awakenings, Lugh succeeds in disarming Tony's once-solid grip on reality. In this three-part fable, author Richard Beeson sets a bold pace for the world he creates--a delicious world where killer whales morph into limo drivers and men fall in love with the daughters of gods. Here is magic realism at its finest.
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From the Preface to the Tenth Anniversary Edition:
The image on the cover is a modern carving of the Mayan goddess Ix Chel. To quote a passage from this book, "She is goddess of the moon, childbirth, death, the endless cycle...The rattlesnakes stand for nobility, reincarnation, and eternity. Nobility, because they are polite: they warn you with their rattles when you get too close. Reincarnation, because they shed their skins and grow new ones; eternity, because birth, death, the shedding of skin, go on for all time. Ix Chel is goddess of the moon, because the cycles of the moon are the cycles of fertility, the cycles that create our crops and our children. She is the goddess of death, because death is the other side of birth. There can be no birth without death."I purchased the carving in the photograph from the man who carved it, a Mayan guard outside Loltun cave, in Yucatán, in May 1980. He spoke no English, but I managed to carry on a conversation with him using my rudimentary Spanish (with the help of a pocket dictionary) for several hours. Now, almost forty years later, I have come to realize how deeply what he told me informed my subsequent thinking, and that Ix Chel represents the spirit of magic and mystery that I wanted to convey. I have therefore put her on the cover.
