Author Guest Post with M. Laszlo: The Phantom Glare of Day

The Phantom Glare of Day tells of Sophie, a young lady who has lived a sheltered life and consequently has no idea how cruel public school bullying can be.

Welcome to the March 2nd stop on the blog tour for The Phantom Glare of Day by M. Laszlo with Goddess Fish Promotions. Be sure to follow the rest of the tour for spotlights, reviews, more guest posts, and a giveaway! More on that at the end of this post.

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Author Guest Post

The Importance of Telling Stories in the Past Tense

When we look out at the world, we seek to understand the phenomena—and as we seek to do that, we quickly realize that nothing can help us other than our memories. Here’s the thing, though: the remembrance of persons, places, and things past enlightens only because we readily recollect important concepts. That’s why we love to read books written in the past tense. We can assume that something important must have happened in order to have inspired the pages in our hands.

We might as well lose ourselves in the past. Why? Because the ethical issues that face modern society never really change all that much. The struggles are eternal.

When I traveled to London back in the summer of 1985, every impulse told me to keep a diary replete with my thoughts and observations. Still, even then, the things that haunted me were the things that happened in the recent past.

Thinking back to that summer of 1985 in London, one event more than any other really triggered me and pretty much ensured my resolve to someday address the human condition. At one point, a bunch of us traveled north to Liverpool, where we stayed in the dorms—which doubled as youth hostels back in the day. At any rate, in the morning, the Beatles’ Museum came to collect us in the Magical-Mystery-Tour bus, at which point the curator proceeded to give us a guided tour of all the places in the city pertaining to the Beatles’ lives and/or the lyrics to the songs. After a while, we came to the gates of Strawberry Fields Orphanage. It was then that the curator/guide told me an absolutely heartrending true-life tale: evidently, one summer before, a young man had traveled from South America to take the Magical Mystery Tour—and when he had reached the gates of the orphanage, he had backed up into the street in order to get the perfect shot of the iconic gate. Sure enough, a motorcar had come along and had killed him. At that point, the curator told me all about how the young man’s parents had then traveled from South America, only because they had wanted to see the place where their beloved son had died. And according to the curator, when she had brought them to Strawberry Fields Orphanage, the young man’s parents had wept so hard that they had both ended up clinging to the gate lest they fall to their knees.

As a youth of seventeen years, the story was as devastating as anything anyone had ever told me. The story haunts me to this day, and it influenced the ending of one of my novellas, (Mouvements Perpètuels to be precise.) There was no avoiding it, though. The simple but haunting true story was the first time that someone had ever really confronted me with the necessity of addressing the preciousness and fragility of life. Also, it should come as no surprise that the Strawberry Fields tale ultimately came to serve as the anchor and lynch pin for a novella that compares and contrasts the abortion issue and the euthanasia issue alike. In a way, the young man who died at the gates of that orphanage became my muse. That’s my feeling anyway.

To be sure, all authors have similar kinds of wounds that they endeavor to heal through the art of writing. Perhaps this is why the sensitivity factor is so important. One must be prepared to examine issues surrounding power and privilege and saviorism and such. In a sense, though, book lovers have always been this way. Back in the eighteenth-century literary salons of Berlin, Rahel Varnhagen discussed anything and everything with Goethe, Brentano, and whoever else might be reading selections on any given night. Let’s not forget, though, that more often than not, those authors discussed and debated stories from the past—the stories and true-life events that had served to inspire their poetry. The same applies to authors. Whenever we do zoom calls and that kind of thing, the feeling is one of belonging to a really conscientious literary salon. Again, though, the tales that people share always center around wounds experienced in the past.

One last thing. When we engage in the remembrance of persons, places, and things past, we unconsciously acknowledge that other cerebral function—the impulse to think presciently and to prepare for the unknown. As ironic as it might seem, nothing really helps us to prepare for the future quite like a heartfelt reckoning with the past event.

About the Book

The Phantom Glare of Day
by M. Laszlo

Published 1 November 2022
SparkPress

Genre: Coming of Age Historical Fiction
Page Count: 320
Add it to your Goodreads TBR!

In this trio of novellas, three game young ladies enter into dangerous liaisons that test each one’s limits and force them to confront the most heartrending issues facing society in the early twentieth century. The Phantom Glare of Day tells of Sophie, a young lady who has lived a sheltered life and consequently has no idea how cruel public-school bullying can be. When she meets Jarvis, a young man obsessed with avenging all those students who delight in his daily debasement, she resolves to intervene before tragedy unfolds. Mouvements Perpétuels tells of Cäcilia, a young lady shunned by her birth father. She longs for the approval of an older man, so when her ice-skating instructor attempts to take advantage of her, she cannot resist. Not a month later, she realizes that she is pregnant and must decide whether or not to get an abortion. Passion Bearer tells of Manon, a young lady who falls in love with a beautiful actress after taking a post as a script girl for a film company—and is subsequently confronted with the pettiest kinds of homophobia.

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Excerpt

London, 29 September, 1917.

Early that morning at the Chelsea Court Hotel, Cäcilia finally realized that last month’s assignation with her ice-skating instructor had left her pregnant. For the longest time, she paced about her suite and debated the question of what might be the best way to tell him. Whatever she said, Herr Wechseljahr would be galled. The old man would almost certainly accuse her of being marriage-minded, and he would insist that she had planned everything all along. At some point, too, he would be sure to lament her upcoming debut.

“For so long, I’ve been choreographing that glorious ice ballet,” he would tell her. “And you treat me like this?”

At nine o’clock, when Cäcilia reached Empress Avenue Ice Arena, she continued into the grand antechamber but then stopped. How do I tell him the bad news?

In time, the wintry air of the electric skating palace made her teeth chatter. Worse still, the aroma of the snack bar’s freshly-brewed, Cadbury drinking chocolate happened to be very strong that day—strong enough to make her retch.

The ice arena’s various loudspeakers crackled to life, and as she continued to convulse, a warped recording of Édouard Lalo’s “Ballade à la lune” commenced.

As the music played, several diminutive schoolgirls laced up and ventured off into the imponderable beauty of the oval rink.

Cäcilia climbed into the hard-oak terrace, and she watched the most winsome of the children perform a fan spiral.

The Lalo recording concluded, and the vast skating palace grew as quiet as the ruins of the Colosseum.

Cäcilia’s thoughts turned to Knightsbridge Casino. One week earlier, she had lost a considerable amount at the baccarat table. As such, she did not have sufficient funds to hire someone to tend to a newborn baby. Before long, she turned to one of the loudspeakers. 

If only another recording would begin—and disrupt the quietude, the solemnity.

From the direction of the snack bar, the aroma of Cadbury drinking chocolate grew even more sickly-sweet. Worse yet, the scent of the pungent Cocoa Essence had begun to commingle with the smoldering lampblack odor of the rubber tiles surrounding the boards.

Down on the ice, the little girl from before, the one who had performed the fan spiral, commenced a series of intricate step sequences.

And now the door to the grand antechamber opened, and Herr Wechseljahr made his entrance. When he reached the terrace, he flashed a proud, fatherly smile and greeted Cäcilia with his customary Roman salute.

About the Author

M. Laszlo is the pseudonym of a reclusive author living in Bath, Ohio. According to rumor, he based the pen name on the name of the Paul Henreid character in Casablanca, Victor Laszlo.

M. Laszlo has lived and worked all over the world, and he has kept exhaustive journals and idea books corresponding to each location and post.

It is said that the maniacal habit began in childhood during summer vacations—when his family began renting out Robert Lowell’s family home in Castine, Maine.

The habit continued in 1985 when, as an adolescent, he spent the summer in London, England. In recent years, he revisited that journal/idea book and based his first work, The Phantom Glare of Day, on the characters, topics, and themes contained within the youthful writings. In crafting the narrative arcs, he decided to divide the work into three interrelated novellas and to set each one in the WW-I era so as to make the work as timeless as possible.

M. Laszlo has lived and worked in New York City, East Jerusalem, and several other cities around the world. While living in the Middle East, he worked for Harvard University’s Semitic Museum. He holds a bachelor’s degree in English from Hiram College in Hiram, Ohio and an M.F.A. in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York.

His next work is forthcoming from SparkPress in 2024. There are whispers that the work purports to be a genuine attempt at positing an explanation for the riddle of the universe and is based on journals and idea books made while completing his M.F.A at Sarah Lawrence College. 

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