The Furnace Room (Paperback or Softback)

Fifteen year old Robbie Merlin’s turbulent coming-of-age draws him through the furnace room at his high school into the hidden Arthurian world of Dragon Light. Here he learns he is a Fire Tender charged with re-igniting the forge and freeing his dragon. Years later, with Dragon Light behind him and his thirty year teaching career at the same high school coming to an end, he mentors a talented artist in the afterschool program whose art raises the possibility Dragon Light really exists.

Advance Praise

Fascinating, searching, tender-hearted, and wise, David Memmott’s The Furnace Room argues that behind every door exists a possibility space called stories, called rewriting and re-righting, called magic and mystery and monsters and myth, called fiction as a mode of transformative philosophy that can heal us in this culture’s noisy hospital of hurt. It’s less a coming-of-age novel—though, in a sense, it is certainly that—than it is a book about an age that could be coming if only we were courageous enough to imagine it into existence.

—Lance Olsen, author of An Inventory of Benevolent Butterflies

The Furnace Room will take your breath away. It’s a roller coaster ride that will take you from coming-of-age realism, into and out of phantasmagoria, and from Blackboard Jungle into and out of the dark unreal. In these pages are brilliant truths and troubling questions that will stay with you long after you finish reading. Buckle up. Tight turns and steep slopes ahead.

—Molly Gloss, award winning author of Wild Life and The Dazzle of Day

David Memmott's second novel, The Furnace Room, is a long-anticipated prose wonderment from a writer lauded more for his poetry and short stories. Set in a deeply felt and authentic 1960s milieu, the book features a teenaged hero, Robbie Merlin, whose mix of noble and self-serving qualities make for an utterly believable character. The colorful cast of supporting characters live their own independent lives while perfectly complementing Robbie's quest. And like his own nature, his grail journey is an astonishing and alluring hybrid of the mythic and the quotidian. With surprises and revelations galore, this book is the seismic tracing of an entire life, deserving to be filmed by the Terry Gilliam who brought The Fisher King to the screen. Fans of Lev Grossman, Leif Enger and Jeffrey Ford will revel in this warm-hearted and astonishing tale.

—Paul Di Filippo, author of Vangie’s Ghosts, Ribfunk, The Steampunk Trilogy and others.

The Furnace Room kept surprising me, starting out like another coming-of-age-through-a-portal tale, but with a more realized reality, then goes on to become something bigger, encompassing the world from now back to 1964 through Boise, Idaho and Irish mythology into a new theory of dragons and quantum physics. A mind-expanding trip for readers of all ages.

—Ernest Hogan, author of High Aztech and Guerrilla Mural of a Siren’s Song