Pilgrim's Progress Redux Author:L. D. Clark The stories in this collection are the fruits of long cultivation in the field of the author's calling. The Wall; recounts an epiphany, one widely common in the maturing of human beings: confrontation with the first apparition of death in a young life. The child prevails here by reaching out for a mythical metaphor to bridge the awesome contradi... more »ction between his small threatened existence and the great mystery beyond. The Naming of the Animals takes a parallel path to the same end. The fearful distance between the innocent heart and stark reality is also reconciled by turning to myth, by drawing this time on the imagery of our supreme myth: the Bible. This miraculous work encompasses the longing to link the everyday with the universal in several stories in this volume. The child in Naming... conceives of a name for the beast fitting to contain its ferocity, much as Adam did when God called on him to name all the animals of Creation. In Is This Naomi? the contest with death arrives on the verge of old age, with a hero who stares down its fearful visage by uniting in vision with an ancient suffering analogous to his own. From this point on, the stories of more recent composition attempt themes testing the limits of fictional probing, a dedication to experiment undertaken after numerous years devoted to the craft. Gold Star Mother examines the delusions of a woman who will not believe that her son is dead, in spite of conclusive evidence that he is. The narrative enters the far realms of her quest, as she also compels others into the service of her delusion. Joshua Briscoe finds us in the presence of visions possessing a man who believes himself to be the direct descendant of a prophetess from the time of King Saul. In Snow Woman a loner is compelled by his own nature to follow his beloved beyond the joys of carnal embrace into the death of the body, where the only sense of being is in the skeleton. 3300 B. C. turns from hallucination to the prehistoric, imagining the Ice Man of the Alps to have been a creature like ourselves, harried by the same challenges and sustained by the same hopes. Pilgrim's Progress Redux rounds out this volume's gamut of recurring human constants with a contemporary reliving of John Bunyan's epic journey through time to eternity: where life is indeed a dream and God permits a vast reach of metaphor.« less