Lucky's Last Theory: A Novel (ePub)

In the spirit of 'Cuckoo's Nest' comes this missing person mystery exploring mind, memory, and loss thereof. A novel of intrigue and ideas.

Two nights ago Lucky's mind felt mired in sludge, slow to process but at least stable. Then he comforted Alois, a mysterious, alluring, and clearly terrified seductress who warned him to be on high alert without providing details. Once he fell asleep, she vanished, and now nobody seems to know anything about her.

Lucky's head has begun throbbing, his back is sore, and one thing after another is going wrong. He needs to find Alois for her sake as well as his, except-how so when his memory of her is fading fast and he has no leads to fall back on?

Meet Lucky Wellington, a middle-aged once-brilliant high-achiever now confined to a medical asylum of Kafkaesque players with little recall of the how, what, or why. Abandoned by friends and family, he remains acutely observational and ever theorizing, desperate to make sense of his unexplained decline.

As Lucky's search unfolds, he's forced to confront hard questions on love, self-identity, and freedom as well as more modern concerns like the mind-scrambling effects of technology, the obscenity of forced institutionalization, and the 'Big A', a relentless neurological affliction capable of rendering a brain on fire into a pile of smoking embers. Unable to put Alois out of his thoughts, he grows exhausted and experiences a succession of absurdities and horrors, surprises and delights, each contributing a puzzle-piece to a clue suggesting a deep connection between the the missing woman's abrupt withdrawal and his crumbling psyche.

Offbeat but upbeat, the novel presents a reconstruction of Lucky's journals and audio-taped meditations that preserves his effusive and sometimes rambling voice. What emerges is a lively novel that straddles the hairline between tragedy and comedy, the story of a jinxed hero exploring what it means to be 'human' and the central role of memory-from normal to corrupted to nearly extinguished-in that tangled equation.