I have to describe “The Mourning After” in 300 words or less, emphasizing protagonist, setting, and theme. This is 273. What do you think? Any suggestions?:
Nightmares of war and death from lost centuries torment a young boy. He can’t separate fantasy from reality. Denis meets a child he calls M. She knows his dreams intimately. Telling him they’re more than imagination, she asks, “Do you … remember?”
They tear at him with devastating force and detail. Driven by a need for answers, the adult Denis searches America, finding only more questions.
Amid the storms and whispers of a haunted forest with intentions of its own, he finds a decrepit cabin, where his terrors start coming real. Beside its old barn someone has been tending the grave of at least one of his “imaginary” childhood playmates, Enoch.
Nothing makes sense if he can’t let himself believe that he and M lived there long ago. That they’ve loved each other for lifetimes, with increasing desperation, as he keeps dying young, leaving her grieving into lonely old age.
Enoch, always in the background, somehow holds the key to ending this cycle of suffering.
Denis searches for M, as she fights her own haunting mysteries back to him.
He meets a quiet, mysterious man in the forest.
In a world where death is just another beginning, they must trust in what they cannot believe.
M arrives too late. She finds Denis’s journal, his grave, and this deeply hurting stranger. To smash this ancient chain of tragedy, she must follow Denis into death.
From the other side, he has to find a way to stop her.
Then she falls in love with the stranger.
That which can’t possibly be true weaves through wonders that can’t be denied, until love makes everything real.