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Overview

The Edge Climbers I: Dementia tells of the return to our world of benevolent and evil spirits as told to a priest by a ghost. Finding himself in the basement of an abandoned jail with what seems to be a circus dwarf in possession of a mysterious ornate bag and a wild tale, Father Francois Xavier LeCroiux listens throughout a stormy Denver night as Jean-Raille Darnoc tells an impossible story of love and hate and of ghosts and mortals.Darnoc’s account begins in 1966 when the Edge Climbers secure the first of three mortal hosts to carry them into dimension.Kelvin Hedrik is the product of generations of alcoholism and himself already an addicted teenager. Kelvin is delusional, hallucinating and suffering a world-class bout of DT’s at his mother’s funeral, the day he finds himself orphaned and promptly adopted by Ed G., the Edge’s leader, and another ghost named Conrad.The Edge Climbers are there to help, to fix that thirst of his forever. The boy strikes an immortal deal with Ed G. and Conrad and horror soon commences front-and-center in the mountain town of Introit, Colorado. With Kelvin’s help, the Edge begins tricking the dying then snatching their souls.Uncle Obi, the second mortal recruited by Ed G., is the candy maker in Introit. He’s also its resident child molester/killer.The Edge Climber ghosts arrive not without challenge. Good ghosts, those members of The Kingdom who have always protected mankind from the Edge, anticipate evil’s arrival. The Kingdom’s ghosts dwell most of the time within animal and human hosts: birds, cats, bats, dogs, deranged street people, those with brain injuries and the institutionalized insane. A few ghosts take up residence in seemingly normal mortals, but like Officer Leo Bonatello, they soon begin to question their sanity when they start talking to their spectral guests.The old timers, like Grandpa Woody, pass down the ghost mythology—the old Mt. Yakla secrets as they are called—to the young folks, like his granddaughter Laura Davidson, who as an adult becomes a Colorado State Police detective along with her husband Brad. She eventually hosts a warrior ghost, named No, Brad hosts the wizard ghost, Oz Ark.A Message from the Author!The Edge Climbers series was first published in 1999, so some technology and events are dated and I left it that way.One of my favorite plot lines is the Scheherazade. The Scheherazade storyline is also one of the most difficult to write and certainly one of the most challenging, yet satisfying to read.Here are the four elements that steer a Scheherazade story:• There is always only one storyteller who has an audience of only one listener. In The Edge Climbers,our storyteller is the ghost Darnoc and our one-man audience is the priest LeCroiux.• The storyteller captivates his listener with a series of seemingly unrelated short stories in which new characters suddenly emerge and old characters seem to disappear and reappear randomly. The storyteller in the story uses this tactic to manipulate the listener to some ends without the listener knowing. • Each story never quite finishes and the storyteller in the story always falsely promises the next installment answers all. If you are familiar with the origin of the plot, this is how the Persian Queen Scheherazade saved her life night after night until her husband abandoned the thought of killing her. • The last story concludes by revealing that all the short stories and every character were really connected after all. The listener abandons his or her original beliefs and is changed forever by the experience.I think a Scheherazade plot is wonderfully a mosaic of sorts in which the reader, not the writer, assembles the pieces and lessons. I have had dozens of readers since 1999 make tens of dozens disparate conclusions about Edge Climbers and Kelvin and Ed G. and King George and Darnoc/Conrad etc. that I never imagined—and they are right!

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