Sirens of Morning Light
Benjamin Anderson
Author Bio
Benjamin Anderson lives in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. Born in 1985, he grew up there, and except for one sojourn after college where he worked as a textbook editor for Larson Texts, Inc, he has always lived there. One other exception exists to this rule. After graduating from high school, he undertook a journey across the United States by van, which is chronicled in Eighteen In Cross-country Odyssey. By observing this cross-section of the United States, he got a taste for what the well-being as an adult was like at large in this country before his college days. He holds a B.A. in English and a B.S. in Mathematics from Shippensburg University. He has known three generations of his family to live in central Pennsylvania, although his relatives are scattered throughout the United States. From an early age of fourteen, he began his writing, and he had finished a preliminary draft of his first novel Sirens of Morning Light by the age of seventeen, although he would not publish it until 2011. He garnered local awards for his writing throughout this youth. Recently, he commits to writing poetry on a daily basis. In Sirens of Morning Light Benjamin establishes an episodic journey of a man searching for his identity.
Description
Sirens of Morning Light embraces a plethora of characters who become engulfed in the plight of a scientific experiment who has lost his identity, emerging in the countryside of Iowa. Eighteen-year-old Chase Wilson encounters this stranger by an apple tree, diagnosing his amnesia. He names the stranger Dan, directing the stranger to visit the Joneses for the possibility of aid. This farm-based family accepts him into their community, and Dan grows especially fond of the innocence of the children that is akin to his search for identity. He also encounters a voluptuous woman who visits the family, though it turns out that she is married, and he believes he should save himself for his true family. Dan has dreams that seem to remind him of his past as a child, then a husband, and a father. In order to interpret these dreams, he seeks the counsel of Anthony, who was once a preacher. As he takes Dan into his house, he instructs Dan on life in general while keeping his word on helping him to remember who he is. Disturbed by another dream, Dan walks down the road where he encounters the church graveyard. Ray, who is the henchman of the doctor who created Dan, reveals to him that he is James and that the true James was buried here. Thus, James realizes that his placement in this country is not by mistake, and he as a scientific experiment is like the James who once lived. After James makes his escape from this man back to Anthony’s home, Ray follows him, breaking down the door and commenting that a custody battle by his master Dr. Wadsworth will be inevitable. Soon afterward, James walks down the road one more time to reencounter the woman who had visited him at his first home. Rebecca O’Connell then recognizes James because he says who he is, though she shuns him, saying she is married. However, her son Matt had been the son of the true James who died. She cannot deny her feelings toward seeing James again forever. Thus the story graduates to its apex, including most of the characters in the story. James must decide for Rebecca and himself not just on who he knows he is now but who he wants to become.
Book excerpt
Darkness cloaks the land. Silent remains the night. All across the great expanse of Iowa, beings surrender to enchanting dreams as emptiness remains in the wake, the path traveled and abandoned by creatures of night roaming upon the night, concealing the crafts to reveal themselves by morning light. Spring is upon the country. Autumnal vestiges nourish the land. And there it resides on the eastern horizon, the sun ready to ascend into morning and brighten the skies above, banishing illusions of night as figments of imagination and mind sail valiantly off into the wake, dreams crashing upon the shores of untamed reality where will be found that for which so long has been sought through the night, that harmony and completeness in serenity, relinquishing the fires of turmoil and desire, rising high upon the wings of human bondage into the presence of a renewed being all in the awakening.
The land of Iowa is a wavering plain, and the plain is soil and life. Folds of darkness blanket the land, easing the human race to sleep. Upon the land come stumbling and laboring the creatures of night, employed by hunger and need, scurrying for food in the flowing fields and crevices of darkness alike, beseeching that required element, satiating desire’s need to retain the wanderings of life. The revealing air is left to void. Silence contains the secrets upon the land.
Out of silence a presence is born. A thread of voices abounds like a soft cry, unmistakable in its being. The chirping of crickets over the fields merges and flows as a river over rocks, humming as a mother to her newborn child, revealing a song ancient by those that have long retained its verse, not erring from a note. This alone sounds the night; this alone conceals the cautioned steps of other beings, not wanting to snap a twig lest a predator search upon the source of the sound. Into the darkness creatures disband.
Gentle are the winds of night, lifting blades of grass and stalks of corn as though stroking hair upon precious heads. Above, the wind sweeps the few clouds present in the nighttime sky, leaving in full view the abundant light of a full moon. Illuminated, its face features the dark scars on light surfaces. Evident through the darkened sky, constellations of spring shine through. Pegasus suspends its eternal race in a state of rest. Draco hangs as a looming specter. Poised in the sky is Orion, locked in his warrior stance in the sky forever. Taurus graces the sky as the animal of might that dances with his foe, and Gemini, the twins, one constellation in the presence of two bodies, two worlds in separate space but together alike, everything being two in what is one object, hang as though withholding some truth that becomes a lingering mystery. And the guiding North Star, hanging in the Little Dipper, shines radiant to needy eye. These celestial objects compose the nighttime sky.
Author Website
Best place to buy your book