Coming Soon -- Beyond the Fourth Door by Richard Seltzer

The publisher, All Things that Matter Press, says this novel should be out in a couple weeks.

Summary:

Without knowing why or how, a pair of college students wake up 50 years older than they were when they went to sleep and with no memory of what has happened in between.

Trying to figure out what has happened to them, they read a novel that Frank wrote about them and his family before the missing years. This novel within the novel is a coming-of-age family saga with
Charlie, an amateur movie maker;
Sarah his insightful bible-believing mother;
Irene, his creative and uninhibited wife;
Frank, his nephew, the author of the novel; and
Marge, who loves and hates both Frank and Charlie.

Trying to sort truth from fiction, when perception and action are often shaped by lies, Frank and Marge bond with one another as they find ways to slip through cracks in time and space.

The first door is birth. The second is death. Frank and Marge go through the fourth door.

Dedication
To my wife Barbara (1950-2012)

Acknowledgements

This book had several lives. It began more than fifty years ago as Restless, a story fragment that wanted to become a novel. Later it grew to Say Uncle and still later to Sandcastles, incorporating short movie scripts that I had never filmed as well as a couple of short stories, but it had no ending. The old drafts and notes gathered dust for nearly forty years, then suddenly the characters came alive and started talking to me in my sleep and told me the new beginning, told me to throw away the second half and gave me a new ending, with a new concept of what may lie beyond death or instead of death.

I want to thank:
Robert Penn Warren who commented on Restless fifty years ago
Ed Trobec and Rex Sexton who knew it as Say Uncle.
My Uncle Paul who saw it as Sandcastles.
Jean Otis Freeman and my grandparents Leona Daly Seltzer and Warren Ray Seltzer who provided inspiration.
Rochelle Cohen, Rex's widow, who provided frequent helpful feedback and encouragement on the final version.
Gabi Coatsworth for her monthly Writers' Rendezvous meetup sessions and advice, which led me to find my terrific publisher, All Things That Matter Press.
My son Bob for his continuing support.