Bashert: A Ghostly Romance

by Jonathan Decoteau

What if meeting the love of your life meant a certain and untimely death?

Bashert is a gothic melodrama written in a romanticized style that answers just this question. After a year of mourning, widowed accountant Aria Stevens places one last bouquet of roses on her late husband's grave. She announces that she plans to move on, to marry and start a family. The ghost of her first husband, Donovan, is unable to let Aria go. He returns, revealing to Aria that she and he are bashert, two twin souls who are fated to be born once every five hundred years and who will do anything to reunite. In unbearable pain without Aria, Donovan intends on having Aria join him in an eternal wedding on the other side, even if it means her death. Frightened, Aria must make a choice. Should she join her first love? If not, how can she help her first husband find peace while staying true to her husband-to-be? Donovan too must make a choice. Does true love mean holding on forever or knowing when to let go?

234 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 17, 2011

About the author

Jonathan Adam DeCoteau lives near a cemetery and indicates that has made all the difference in his writing.

You develop a strange sense of peace and a desire to pay homage to those whove come before, he states. It does make a difference to wake up in the morning, look out the window, and see a gravesite staring back at you. Sure, it may not be as cheery as sunshine on the windowpane, but its a keen reminder that our time here is limited and that we must tell our stories lest the world forgets.

Most of Jonathans work feels haunted by the need to remember and to understand. As an English teacher, Jonathan edited an award-winning student publication "The Glory and The Dream," which contained the poetry and fiction of writers during the World War II period to the present.

Its amazing the way those kids during perceived the last centurys greatest war. They had a different way of looking at politics and at reality.

Remembrance also made its way into Jonathans first collection of stories, "Sing of The High Country," a work haunted by the bloody sins of New Englands past, vividly painted upon the page.

I just wanted to indicate that slavery, plantationsthese did exist, in the North just as in the South, even if not in the same abundance. Slavery, racism, oppressionthese are national issues, not regional ones. Theyre part of the human story and they need to be told.

"Sing of the High Country" went on to win The 2005 Eric Hoffer Book Award in General Fiction and place as finalist in The 2004 The Foreword Magazine Book of the Year competition. Jonathans work has also appeared in Readers Quarterly.

The macabre does have its rewards, however. Jonathan wrote "The Naked Earth" after reading about Nazi atrocities in Simon Wiesenthals The Sunflower.

In class one day, I asked students if Karl, a Nazi officer, would truly feel sorry if he werent on deaths doorstep, but had to live an agonizingly long life knowing that he killed the innocent. Would a life of repentance change anything? The bell rang and the students left. But the question remained. Thats when I discovered Evan Khein Al-Mohummad, who took me on a journey to uncover the limits of human atrocity and redemption.
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