Trujillo - Hardcover

Shepard, Lucius.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1902880862 ISBN 13: 9781902880860

Publisher: PS Publishing, 2004

Synopsis

In the town of Trujillo, in Honduras, on the edge of the Mosquito Coast, Dr. Arturo Ochoa, a semi-retired psychiatrist, has a single a troubled young man named Thomas Stearns, the son of a wealthy Atlanta family. Stearns has been found adrift on the Carribean in a vessel owned by two Nicaraguans, both of whom are missing; he has been alone for eighteen days and has little memory of that time. Suspected of murder, Stearns is unconcerned. He knows his family will buy off the police. But he is reluctant to leave Trujillo, having developed an odd affinity for the town. As therapy progresses, he tells of a mysterious stone figure regurgitated by, improbably, a whirlpool, and Dr. Ochoa, drawn into his pathology, begins to doubt not only Stearns' sanity, but his own.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly

Heat-the steamy oppression of Honduras's Mosquito Coast and the turgid psychological condition of this novel's two leading characters-dominates Shepard's macabre excursion into the paranormal (after Colonel Rutherford's Colt). Having survived eighteen days adrift in the Caribbean, even after the suspicious disappearance of his two Nicaraguan companions, wealthy young American Thomas Stearns is treated for amnesia by semi-retired Honduran psychiatrist Dr. Arturo Ochoa. Sinister flotsam surfaces from Stearns's unconscious as he half-remembers a primitive statue rising out of a maelstrom, a Mesoamerican artifact supposedly buried at Trujillo by Columbus's men and containing an ancient demon. The statue's symbolism posits an interrelation between death and sexuality that gradually obsesses Ochoa until the physician/patient roles reverse, a process catalyzed by the strangely gifted young native woman Stearns marries. Though Shepard's extended scenes of sexual predation and sadism may be excessive, his evocation of sultry tropical dangers and spiritual possession is powerful, like a suffocating nightmare when the air conditioning-or conventional morality-has broken down.
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Edition details

• Publisher: PS Publishing
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1902880862
• ISBN 13: 9781902880860
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 682