The Awakening

by Richard C. Meredith

Past and present mingle, conscious and subconscious memory intertwine in this impressive work of the imagination. Described by the author as an “old-fashioned ghost story”, The Awakening explores with chilling subtlety the theme of the uneasy dead seeking peace—a fear which must go back into our paleolithic subconsciousness.

It’s hoped that a few month’s rest at the rundown farmhouse, Aaron’s Rock, will help heal Ray Albright of the effects of a horrendous car accident: a badly broken back, terrible guilt at the death of his passengers, and the swift comprehension of how little separates the living from the dead. But the farm is not the expected idyllic refuge, for Ray’s daytime sketching is disturbed by ghastly moans from a thicket close by, his sleep by sounds downstairs of a wounded man’s crawling silenced by an explosion, and his peace of mind by visions of his absent wife in the arms of another man. And he is visited by a recurrent dream, each night a little longer and more real: a band of exhausted men in tattered gray uniforms comes forward in the dawn light, but then turns again wearily to face enemy fire.

Only gradually, and with the help of a lovely and willing neighbor, does Ray come across the story of the Civil War tragedy which killed off the first owners of Aaron’s Rock and whose ghosts are said to haunt the house. And only at the very end does he understand his own soul to be hostage to these ghostly players seeking release from torment.

In this spellbinding novel Richard Meredith makes use of a lifetime spent in the deep South, in towns which, like Aaron’s Rock, cannot bury their unfinished past. He now lives in Milton, Florida, with his wife and children.

Genres: Horror

296 pages, Hardcover

First published May 28, 1979

About the author

Richard Carlton Meredith was an American writer, illustrator and graphic designer, best known as the author of science fiction short stories and novels including "We All Died at Breakaway Station" and The Timeliner Trilogy.

Meredith's works give unfamiliar twists to many familiar SF themes: A human Galactic empire and its struggle with a non-human rival (We All Died at Breakaway Station) or with independence-seeking human subjects (The Sky Is Filled with Ships); a theocratic dictatorship, nuclear and biological warfare, and the effort to change history by time travel (Run, Come See Jerusalem!); or the "sidewise" travel into alternate histories and the struggle for control over a multitude of divergent timelines (The Timeliner Trilogy).

Meredith's protagonists tend to be highly motivated and devoted people, wholeheartedly taking up Earth- or Universe-shaking causes to which they give their all - and often discovering that they had been duped into serving an evil cause, or that an action taken with the best of intentions actually makes a bad situation worse. A reader opening a Meredith book can by no means count on a happy ending - indeed, some of the books can be classed as dystopias.

In the preface to Breakaway Station, before the reader had yet met the protagonists, Meredith already tells that all of them would eventually die heroic deaths comparable to those of Leonidas and his three hundred at the Battle of Thermopylae — and indeed, the book duly comes to precisely that ending.

Meredith died unexpectedly on 8 March 1979, aged only 41, following a stroke brought on by a brain hemorrhage.He was survived by his wife and four children.