THE EVOCATION OF DANCING STARS

by Brengle, Edward Quine

This thesis is an anthology of short-stories and a single one-act play that come together to comprise a strange, metaphorical journey from damnation to a very human kind of apotheosis. All occupy a borderland between “conventional” contemporary literary fiction and science-fiction, speculative fiction, fantasy and magical realism, using the absurd, the apocalyptic and the spectacular to examine the smallest, most mundane, yet most important of human concerns. Most of the tales feature a crafted holism in terms of story structure, with quantum mechanics and other fields of the higher sciences forming a metaphor for the chaotic grace of human relationships, modern existence and their fuzzy, self-conscious mediations between humor and sadness. A collection of modern myths.