THE PHOENIX DIARIES
240 Pages
Self-Published
Published 2004
SYNOPSIS
THE PHOENIX DIARIES is a psychological novel about disillusion and rebirth--about a man who, by giving up his identity, finds it.
When Marty Castle's promising career as an actor meets with sudden failure, he joins an international agency created to fight terrorism. Disillusioned and cynical, he is faced with the opportunity to impersonate the Phoenix--a popular radical leader with Robin Hood pretensions--who, unbeknownst to his followers, has been killed. This seemingly suicidal plan is made more plausible by Marty's uncanny resemblance to the slain leader, and by a journal found by the dead man's body. The journal makes clear that the Phoenix has for some time been psychotic, living in a fantasy world, and is no longer the leader of his organization.
What Marty finds when he undertakes this journey is both more ordinary and far stranger than all his imaginings, and in the dream world of the Phoenix he finds what he had lost in his own.
EXCERPTS
“It rained the day Marty Castle came to work for us, the first rain in eight months. Wilson Cripps, my boss, was giving a party for his staff at his house in the hills…”
“If you could manage,” he says, still without moving his lips, “to find an Oriental Woman of Great Dignity who would give you a gold ring as thin as a thread that shines with a peculiar light, you could open the door without a key. Just as I can talk without moving my lips.”
“It was a big honor, you know, to be in her workshop. Even if you were famous you had to audition. She believed all actors were limited by their unwillingness to get in touch with some part of themselves, some trait or impulse they don’t want to admit was there—some meanness or cruelty, some softness or weakness, something inappropriate to their gender, blah blah blah—and this was the focus of her work. A good actor, she said, has to be able to identity fully with anyone, no matter how vicious or ridiculous.”