A Dream of the Night-Blooming Cereus

Aloha from Honolulu, late 1960s/early 70s, the flowering metropolis of the Aloha state, full of rainbows, exotic flora, grass skirts, and paradoxically, the angry anti-Viet Nam war sentiment spreading across college campuses throughout the U.S. As the angry drums of war beat outside the classrooms, inside the university Plant Science lab Seamus Devlin, a brilliant and troubled doctoral candidate and his mentor, the eccentric, aging Dr. Hernan Hana, investigate a rare sub-species of the Night-Blooming Cereus, a succulent plant that flowers only one night a year and may reveal a life-altering truth about human evolution, they hope. As the on-campus violence escalates, a mysterious, young Asian woman enters their orbit. Is she just a student or something more menacing? Desire ignites old fantasies, academic ethics blur, and the boundaries between science, dream, and delusion begin to dissolve. As the legendary Night-Blooming Cereus flowers for a single night before shriveling into ball of decay, the characters are drawn toward their own moment of irreversible reckoning with each other. Passion resurfaces where it no longer belongs, and love becomes indistinguishable from obsession... and even murder.

Pages: 218, Paperback, Pegasus Elliot MacKenzie Publishers Ltd