Mansfield
Part Four: Old Age, Decline, and Death
by
Book Cover & Preview Text
Ted watches Charlotte leave the room before falling back asleep. Ted feels all the drama from the day’s activities and all his physical exertions are catching up to him, and he begins to have a strange dream just like the night before where he finds himself young again.
This time instead of being Steve Dobbs Marsha’s illegitimate grandson, he is in a bizarre futuristic world. It is a dystopian world where things are very different but somehow quite the same.
In his mind, he is swept away by a tornado to a foreign land, or perhaps he has stepped through a looking glass or fallen down a rabbit hole into a world that is twisted, upside-down, and backwards. Or perhaps some ghost has mistaken him for Ebenezer Scrooge.
Formats
Book Details
About the Book
As the snow falls outside his ambulance window, Steve Dobbs drives to check on his ninety-year-old grandmother, who lives in a mansion haunted by ghosts from her past. After Marsha Winthrop is found dead, Steve is bequeathed the mansion where he eventually starts a new life. But one night after his ambulance crashes in the mansion’s courtyard, Dobbs is found more dead than alive—and dies shortly thereafter.
Ted Mansfield, who was Marsha’s second husband, has hallucinated an entire fictitious lifetime for Steve and from his point of view that indirectly reveals everything Ted knows of the Winthrop family and Marsha’s life after their divorce.
Ted has fallen into a twisted, upside-down world driven by his bizarre dreams. As he moves from one dream to the next, ninety years of events are twisted and replayed in disguise as his subconscious mind reviews his perceptions of reality. As his nights of fitful dreams continue, Ted embarks on more intoxicating adventures as Red, a time traveler hoping for success in a strange, dystopian future.
Mansfield continues the tale of one man’s journey through life as he fitfully dreams about his experiences through alternate realities in one last attempt to make sense of his life and the confusing social, political, and economic events that occurred around the world during the opening years of the twenty-first century.
About the Author
Keith R. Long was raised on a cattle ranch in Grass Valley, California. He earned a BA in English drama from California State University–Chico and served in the United States Marine Corps as an officer and helicopter pilot. Long currently works as a nurse at Folsom Prison in California.