The House of Nordquist is a novel of mystery and suspense that uses Gothic elements to explore and reexamine the myth of Faust in a modern setting.
In The House of Nordquist, the final novel of the Eroica Trilogy, Eugene K. Garber creates his most demonic character of the series. The Faustian Eric Nordquist deep in the infernal regions of the bizarre house of his mad father conducts an atrocious experiment. He will extract from the body of a Holocaust victim sounds for a world-changing symphony. Day after day he stands at his synthesizer transforming the sounds of a maimed body into appalling skeins of lachrymose reverberations. But his theft of the life force of his subject is not his only transgression. He sucks all around him into the vortex of his mad dream of a cleansing cataclysm. His most devoted follower Paul Albright not only assists in the experiment but becomes infected with unholy powers. Now, years later, the House of Nordquist burned to the ground by an unknown arsonist, Eric is on the loose with the score of his abysmal symphony. Paul is in pursuit. Can Paul find Eric and the sinister score? If he does, what will he do?
Eugene K. Garber has published five books of fiction and is the creator, with eight other artists, of EROICA, a hypermedia fiction (http://hypereroica.com/). His collaborations with the visual artist Lynn Hassan span three decades. His work includes strong elements of myth and spiritual quest. Garber’s fiction has won the Associated Writing Programs Short Fiction Award and the William Goyen Prize for Fiction sponsored by TriQuarterly. His fiction has been anthologized in The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Fiction, Revelation and Other Fiction from the Sewanee Review, The Paris Review Anthology, and Best American Short Stories.
