Lightfall

by Paul Monette

In the village of Pitts Landing, true evil can linger for centuries

It all started with the desperate urging of an internal voice, born from a pulse-pounding nightmare: Run. With that, Iris Ammons felt impelled to leave behind her husband, her children, her job, and her idyllic life. Her motive was never clear to her, just a notion that her entire life had become unfamiliar and that she had to get to the West Coast and the mystical village of Pitts Landing.

Similarly focused on the town is its devilishly charismatic cult leader Michael Roman. Michael cuts a bloody swath through his followers in order to get to the secret at the heart of the village.

As the coincidences pile up and the omens stack on top of one another like the bodies of Michael’s disciples, he and Iris find themselves at the center of a mystery that stretches back for generations and has effects that could be felt for centuries to come.

Lightfall is an erotic horror epic from gifted National Book Award winner Paul Monette, a master of combining thrills with intense emotion, no matter what the genre.

Genres: Horror

280 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1982

About the author

Online Guide to Paul Monette's papers at UCLA:
http://findaid.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/...

In novels, poetry, and a memoir, Paul Monette wrote about gay men striving to fashion personal identities and, later, coping with the loss of a lover to AIDS.

Monette was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1945. He was educated at prestigious schools in New England: Phillips Andover Academy and Yale University, where he received his B.A. in 1967. He began his prolific writing career soon after graduating from Yale. For eight years, he wrote poetry exclusively.

After coming out in his late twenties, he met Roger Horwitz, who was to be his lover for over twenty years. Also during his late twenties, he grew disillusioned with poetry and shifted his interest to the novel, not to return to poetry until the 1980s.

In 1977, Monette and Horwitz moved to Los Angeles. Once in Hollywood, Monette wrote a number of screenplays that, though never produced, provided him the means to be a writer. Monette published four novels between 1978 and 1982. These novels were enormously successful and established his career as a writer of popular fiction. He also wrote several novelizations of films.

Monette's life changed dramatically when Roger Horwitz was diagnosed with AIDS in the early 1980s. After Horwitz's death in 1986, Monette wrote extensively about the years of their battles with AIDS (Borrowed Time, 1988) and how he himself coped with losing a lover to AIDS (Love Alone, 1988). These works are two of the most powerful accounts written about AIDS thus far.

Their publication catapulted Monette into the national arena as a spokesperson for AIDS. Along with fellow writer Larry Kramer, he emerged as one of the most familiar and outspoken AIDS activists of our time. Since very few out gay men have had the opportunity to address national issues in mainstream venues at any previous time in U.S. history, Monette's high-visibility profile was one of his most significant achievements. He went on to write two important novels about AIDS, Afterlife (1990) and Halfway Home (1991). He himself died of AIDS-related complications in 1995.

In his fiction, Monette unabashedly depicts gay men who strive to fashion personal identities that lead them to love, friendship, and self-fulfillment. His early novels generally begin where most coming-out novels end; his protagonists have already come to terms with their sexuality long before the novels' projected time frames. Monette has his characters negotiate family relations, societal expectations, and personal desires in light of their decisions to lead lives as openly gay men.

Two major motifs emerge in these novels: the spark of gay male relations and the dynamic alternative family structures that gay men create for themselves within a homophobic society. These themes are placed in literary forms that rely on the structures of romance, melodrama, and fantasy.

Monette's finest novel, Afterlife, combines the elements of traditional comedy and the resistance novel; it is the first gay novel written about AIDS that fuses personal love interests with political activism.

Monette's harrowing collection of deeply personal poems, Love Alone: 18 Elegies for Rog, conveys both the horrors of AIDS and the inconsolable pain of love lost. The elegies are an invaluable companion to Borrowed Time.

Before the publication and success of his memoir, Becoming a Man, it seemed inevitable that Monette would be remembered most for his writings on AIDS. Becoming a Man, however, focuses on the dilemmas of growing up gay. It provides at once an unsparing account of the nightmare of the closet and a moving and often humorous depiction of the struggle to come out. Becoming a Man won the 1992 National Book Award for nonfiction, a historical moment in the history

Reviews

[mark monday · Rating 4 out of 5]

buried treasure alert! this practically unknown gem resists easy classification. it's an ambiguous novel about changes, beginnings, and endings; a "straight" literary novel coming from an author whose specialty was usually wistful stories of gay life and memoirs about living and dying with AIDS; and a sinuous, hypnotic tale of horror about the past coming back to utterly alter the present and the future. and hey it even features actual pirate treasure, so that's two treasures for the price of one.

so something strange is happening to Iris: once a content psychiatrist, wife, and mother, she now finds herself quickly forgetting her past and is instead contemplating the best way to murder random strangers on the street. something strange is also happening to Michael: once a cunning false prophet with a legion of drug-addled followers, he now finds himself quickly forgetting his past and is instead executing any of his inner circle who cross his path. Iris and Michael are drawn inexorably to a small island town off the coast of California. something strange involving that unlikely duo is happening in Pitt's Landing - a town mired in its piratical past and populated by residents from all across the country, some of whom vaguely remember a shadowy past life there. and something strange is happening all over the U.S.: wee little children and doddering seniors and members of Michael's cult are forming little bands, intent on their new goals of destruction and slaughter.

It was as if death itself were making the whole thing up as he went along. Picking them off in a reckless pout, like petals off a daisy.

Paul Monette, rest in peace. he was a giant among gay writers, and certainly one of the more talented. his early novels were slight - often concerning the melancholy lives of people in and connected to Hollywood - but his gentle humanism always shone through the often flimsy plots. then AIDS came along and Monette was reinvented as one of our leading AIDS activists and an author of powerful memoirs about living with the disease. in 1992 his account of growing up gay, Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story won the National Book Award for nonfiction, which was a historic achievement for an openly gay author. in 1995, he succumbed to the disease. Paul Monette is one of the reasons I've chosen to work in the field of HIV care and public policy.

neither the insipidly glamorous cover of the re-issue nor the moronic summary of the book itself (which erroneously describes the novel as "erotic horror"and pantingly focuses on the novel's brief but vivid moments of bloodletting) do any justice to the unique appeal of LIghtfall. I can't even begin to describe what this novel is about and a week after finishing it, I still can't say what has specifically happened or not happened. I really haven't read anything like this book. all I can do is give little snapshots and descriptors:

- finding yourself questioning the personal reality you have made ... "this is not my beautiful house" ...

- a terrible pirate and his terrible plunder; a Native American tribe; an unrequited love; lemmings and leaders; an eclipse and a terrible leap of faith.

- are there really two sides? good and evil; happy and unhappy; embracing life and rejecting it... do such binaries really exist?

- horrific spores that grow on corpses and treasure alike; spores to be consumed by Michael's followers

- life after life after life... is our ending truly the end?

- can a person - or a person's soul - be a ley line? the phrase "ley line" is never mentioned but when considering Iris and Michael, the past and potential changes wrought by them, I was repeatedly drawn to that concept.

- it's not just darkness that blinds - light can blind just as easily.

"There's been a light here for a thousand years," he said with a pedagogical air.

[Peter · Rating 2 out of 5]

The book started very promising, dark and eerie. But soon the passages became repetitive and tedious. Why is the cult leader Michael coming to that place? Is he a kind of supernatural being cursed for his deeds in the past? What about Iris? Why does she leave home and husband? What about history repeating and breaking the circle? In my opinion too many questions remained unanswered and the plot was quite confusing. Single elements were extremely uncanny and the author is very good in writing his prose but the overall package was a bit disappointing to me. Maybe something for fans of the author.

[Victoria · Rating 5 out of 5]

*Hidden Gem Alert *
Well, apparently it's my duty to immediately report back to Goodreads seeing there is only one other written review on here.
I really didn't expect a novel of this magnitude. I expected a cheap shot easy read horror. Oh, was I ever wrong.
I stumbled on this thing in a used book store, in a delicious vintage state, BEAUTIFUL imagery on the cover, and the back synopsis was alluring. Immediate cart.
The official summary reads: (hidden in case you prefer the ambiguous summary above)


It all started with the desperate urging of an internal voice, born from a pulse-pounding nightmare: Run. With that, Iris Ammons felt impelled to leave behind her husband, her children, her job, and her idyllic life. Her motive was never clear to her, just a notion that her entire life had become unfamiliar and that she had to get to the West Coast and the mystical village of Pitts Landing.
Similarly focused on the town is its devilishly charismatic cult leader Michael Roman. Michael cuts a bloody swath through his followers in order to get to the secret at the heart of the village.
As the coincidences pile up and the omens stack on top of one another like the bodies of Michael’s disciples, he and Iris find themselves at the center of a mystery that stretches back for generations and has effects that could be felt for centuries to come.

My dumbed down summary: (hidden in case you would rather not know the synopsis and prefer to go with the ambiguous plot above!)
Our female main character, Iris, is spiritually drawn to the opposite side of the universe, in which some sort of lunar eclipse has turned the entire community crazy.
There she meets some sort of perverse demi-god, Michael, who is in complete harmonic control of this FUCKEDup alternate universe in which everyone is a mindless robot!

There is much of an unrequited love story turned into groundhogs day, every billionth year it happens again.

It really doesn't sound like much of a plot, but I promise it is written in a dreamlike trance.
The language grabs your hand and pulls you along down the rabbit hole where you begin to believe in magic.
This is Bret Easton Ellis meets Dali and has a love child who regularly spoons with Anais Nin.
Please seek this out! Read this if you need a break from reality and want some love, perversion and terror all bundled into one BEAUTIFUL horrific little bow. ♡
I do want to knock OFF a star for the blatant animal cruelty at the end lf the story, it was unnecessary. I am a sensitive animal lover and it shouldn't have taken away from my experience, so I have decided to only take half a star off!
4 1/2 stars!

[Ken · Rating 1 out of 5]

I'm going to be honest, ya'll. I gave up all hope of understanding this book halfway through. This book completely confounded me. Even though I forced myself to finish this book, I still couldn't tell you what the overriding theme is. I'm a huge Paul Monette fan, btw... I'm used to his characters being somewhat enigmatic but this book took the prize in the "WTF Did I Just Read" category.

[OutlawPoet]

DNF

[Pamela · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF