The Implacable Absence is a post-existential fantasy in which a mushroom man, a talking bug and a doppelgänger traverse Faerie, Nirvana, and other planes of existence in search of the Deadly Galerina, an ambiguous deity from the Kingdom of Fungi. The novel is a non-idiomatic improvisational duet because two authors engaged in a genre-defying, spontaneous (improvisational) creative process, rather than a preplanned (compositional) activity. To add intrigue to the process, one author opted not to commit to paper his passages, contributing instead an imaginative silence. Just as in a musical duet in which one participant decides not to perform, the duet becomes equally defined by the notes one musician plays as by the absence of the notes that the other musician does not play. The active musician still responds to the other, albeit now only to the other's silence. To call this half a novel is a misnomer. It is rather a complete novel, written by two authors, one of whom is expressed in silence.
About the Author: Henry E. Gorton was born in Kansas City, Missouri. He is currently a student in the public school system of Phoenix, Arizona. He was awarded a first place prize in the Glendale Union High School District poetry contest in the spring of 2014. He is openly engaged in an on-going quest for lucidity and revelation. David J. Keffer was born in Kansas City, Missouri. He pursued a technical education earning a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Florida and a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Minnesota. After a year as a post-doctoral scholar at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., he began his career as an engineering professor at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, where he remains today. He has published about 100 technical papers in archival journals. Outside of engineering, David Keffer studied world literature and creative writing. He has published analytical articles on the works of Primo Levi and Kobo Abé. He created various reading aids to several classical Chinese novels. Over the past two decades, David Keffer has been active writing novels, poetry and stories. Several novels and illustrated stories are available from the Poison Pie Publishing House at http: //www.poisonpie.com. David Keffer lives in Knoxville, Tennessee with his wife, Lynn, and two children. As a family, they enjoy hiking through the local mountains and are always on the look-out for poison pie and other ambivalent mushrooms that dot the landscape.