Avoid the Day

Facing his father's imminent death, and the unresolved conflict between them, Jay Kirk, award-winning magazine writer, flees on a whirlwind assignment to find a mysterious manuscript in Transylvania before escaping again to the Arctic Circle. A surreal, high-wire act of narrative nonfiction that will redefine the genre, Avoid the Day is part detective story, part memoir, and part meditation on the value of experience, with a dark pulse of existential horror.

Seeking to answer the mystery of a missing manuscript by Béla Bartók, and using the assignment to avoid his father's deathbed, Kirk first travels to Transylvania. There he visits the same villages where the "Master," like a vampire in search of fresh plasma, had found his new material in the folk music of the peasants. With these stolen songs, transmuted by fire, Bartók redefined music in the 20th Century. The author begins to lose his tether as he sees himself in Bartók's darkest and most personal work, the Cantata Profana, which revolves around fathers and sons.

Convinced by an old college friend, now a documentary filmmaker, that he needs to get away from civilization period, following a psychotic episode in Eastern Europe under the spell of Bartók, Kirk joins his friend on a posh eco-tourist cruise to the Arctic. But under the influence of the midnight sun, they scrap the documentary to make a horror film instead-shot under the noses of the unsuspecting passengers and crew. Playing one of the main characters who finds himself inexplicably trapped on a ship at the end of the world, alone, Kirk gets lost in his own cerebral maze, struggling to answer his most plaguing question: can we find meaning in experience? Does any experience have meaning, even a father's death?