Past Meets Present in a Fight to Possess the Cosmos
Read Inside
Twen
ty-first-century scientist Frank Scanlon and a sixteenth-century monk are thrown together by a series of horrific events. Their lives become inextricably bound up with the enigmatic Hérault – a man with exceptional fighting skills and even more deadly persuasive powers who seeks power beyond anything else, using evil as a tool to achieve his ultimate goal. The mysterious namestone and ancient monastery relics are a source of immense forces, perhaps even of the cosmos itself. Loyalty, trust and friendship are stretched to their limits as Frank faces his own battle of good over evil.
A time-shift thriller, Namestone pits fallible, ‘good’ people against implacable evil. It is deliberately thought-provoking fiction, dealing with the inter-connectedness of life and beyond, and with evil and the conflicts it produces in normal people under abnormal stress. Hérault makes no excuses or pretence of goodness, or of being misunderstood.
Its theme is existence, death and survival, and the interplay between faith and modern scientific understanding. Nevertheless, it should be read for the thrill and fun of it.
Prologue
Stars burn in an infinity of black.
The black itself burns with an intensity that would be painful to the eyes, but there is no observer; or perhaps just one. The whole creation is a vast, stretched harmony. What words are there for its state? Active yet poised; tense yet free; in its totality like a solid and like a fluid; void yet pregnant, intense, personal. What could an ‘outside’ observer see? There is, after all, no outside from which it can be seen. The whole pregnant mass, if there were an outside, would take smooth glistening form – but form of what?
‘See! I hold it in my hand. What do you see?
‘You see a stone? But what stone is like this stone?
‘Look at it. Do not look at me. You could not survive that – not yet.
‘Look. Listen. Feel.
‘Here is life. Here is the pulse of all things.
‘Watch.’
Like a single heartbeat the universe pulses, beats, and is never the same again.
Not because it is changed.
But because you are.
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Readers’ comments:
…a dramatic fictional exploration of the eternal fight between Good and evil… immensely readable… imaginative, gripping and thought-provoking… I love the superb quality of the writing… the movement in the story…
The story moves seamlessly between violent action, tensions and dark forces, set against the quiet presence of the namesound: the call of the Namestone.
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anthonyinuk 