On March 26, 1982, two men in a mysterious black pick-up truck brutally attack two bikers on the deserted bluff roads just across the Mississippi River from downtown St. Louis. One biker is killed instantly and the other is severely injured, and the lives of the four men are indelibly changed and linked together, forever.
A Change of Season accounts the final days of each of the men involved in this tragic confrontation and examines the philosophical and existential impact that such an immeasurable event had on each of their lives.
Craig Lerrib, the main antagonist, leads a life of unexamined indifference and unending carnal exploration and ends up morally bankrupt and alone, a reality that permanently alters all those who are caught in the dangerous pull of his orbit.
His partner in the black truck, Peter Doyle, a thoughtful man swept along by his desires, spends his life suppressing the guilt he feels for his part in the murder, as well as his own true sexual feelings, a process that leads to great existential searching and self-awareness, but also unrelenting loneliness and life-long isolation.
Alfred Whitman, the surviving rider, is never quite able to get past the physical impairments sustained in the attack, and he attempts to authenticate in the sterile world of pen and paper what was lost in the physical world of living, a corridor that leads to existential angst and unresolved religious questioning.
And in one last tribute, Alfred Whitman pens a short story in homage to the enigmatic young rider who lost his life that day, Thale, who, although dying at an early age, becomes the true protagonist of the novel and represents the possibility of forgiveness and reconciliation that the other characters are lacking.
In a larger sense, A Change of Season examines the relationships and associations that we make as humans through the restricted prism of our own beliefs, and then explores how these "connections" struggle for survival in a world of endless opposing ideologies. A philosophical process of discovery as mysterious, and in some ways, as unknowable as the very setting of it all, the Mississippi River.
