“Although loneliness is a quality that we all must endure (sometimes even while we are with someone), in every instance of it that I can think of, there is always an intervening event that rips you up in the end, apprehensively targets the tedium at first and crescendoes into an aggressive stranglehold of the heart. And I'll willfully let that happen again, but it's unpredictable when it will occur.”

Aiming to find the man that no longer resides in him, Vic devises a plan to unite with his inner self. In his first summer and autumn in a house on Etherington Crescent, he gathers all the necessities he needs to withdraw from the outside world and reassemble the lonely, marginalized outsider he's become. With a new found purpose, he attracts two women with similar, but subconscious, conflicts of mind. Slowly he comes to realize what underlies their personas. Two trysts develop, one after the other, but no one said it would be easy. No one said things would go awry.

Part One of There Is a Light That Never Goes Out is a memory of how the trio of outsiders came to find one another. The second part is a satirical romance that, in Michael Whone's distinctly modular narrative and wry wit, transforms each beat of Vic's words into a portrait of mystical awakening. Untangling the frustration of losing the lover that waltzed before his eyes and saved his life one winter three years ago, Vic grows enlightened by the urban wilderness around him—a metaphysical beauty surfacing in the shape of his lost love.

A story of Vic, Paula and Sarah, their natural yet unnatural connection with love, and life's fragility pleading them to love just a little bit deeper and more sensibly. In an ideal world, true love would save the day, but as fickle and superficial as relationships are, the three of them lead themselves deeper into a hapless desperation for heartbreak.

Michael Whone

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