A Dark Music
Members of an archaeological dig in southern New Mexico are stunned when nearby construction unearths the remains of a girl dating several millennia before the earliest known inhabitants of North America. The discovery touches the lives of Will Stanton, a withdrawn graduate research assistant who is profoundly attracted to the prehistoric cultures he studies, and Emily Franklin, a plucky undergraduate new to archaeology and freshly arrived from New York. Steeped in the setting of the northern Chihuahuan Desert, A Dark Music is an unusual and magical love story.
They first heard the mountain lion over a week ago. So pure a sound, it seemed to him almost visible, and without a source. It tore his far-flung thoughts right out of him, replacing them with the broad and clarified night. Afterward he thought it must have come from on the mesa, and then he thought maybe he hadn't heard it at all.
But everyone had---that time, and again three nights later. He had just picked up the thermos, was weighing the coffee in it, debating whether to refill his mug, when the animal's second cry ripped across the heavens and was gone, leaving a hollow shape like fire in the memory and a silence so complete that all eyes ended stupidly on the hissing Coleman lanterns, as if only then noticing them. He looked down at his hands then and was surprised to see the mug and the thermos still there.
Each time he was a little less startled, a little more ready, if that were possible, so that the third occurrence arrived like the fulfillment of an expectation. He was exactly on the verge of looking up when the beast cried out.
"It's about reaching through into the meganatural realm. Froese's words breathe and pull the reader into that"somewhere". All of his books are like this, intellect and feeling whisked together so that every line causes you to lose a heartbeat and gain a little magnificent disorientation, while a solid story unfolds like a perfectly natural flower . . . all this, yes, in "every line"."
--Carolyn Chute, author of The Beans of Egypt, Maine
"Froese has brought the archeological dig to life on many levels. Landscape, the traces of buried millennia, vision, and the demanding, patient work come together to evoke the mystery of time. The contemporary world and the prehistoric world engage in a dance that is beautiful, harrowing and moving."
--Baron Wormser, Poet Laureate of Maine
"A fascinating read that's hard to put down, A DARK MUSIC succeeds brilliantly on two levels. First, there's Froese's suspenseful story set in the brooding desert atmosphere of the American Southwest. Throw in sudden storms, a potential rapist, and a prowling mountain lion, and you have a page-turner from start to finish."
--Maine Sunday Telegram
". . . in this arresting novel, something big is unearthed, a mummy from perhaps 23,000 years ago, maybe the archaeological find of the century."
--Bangor Daily News
"Written in a haunting, minor key, with a grave, compassionate bass note--the dark music of Froese's prose evokes a dimension that in the moment seems not only real, but absolute."
--Downeast Coastal Press