Norman's Assault

Norman D Beech enters the world on D-Day just as the mighty Allied armada is landing on the shore an ocean away. He is marked at birth as different from others, a sign of divinely infused belief conflicted by a compelling bias toward self-indulgence. George Beech, moderate in all things except his unlimited love for his firstborn, is later rewarded with insolence, rebellion, and estrangement. Norman, a lowly foot soldier in the war between good and evil, wanders into the dangerous no-man's-land of mediocrity. The prodigal son's comic misadventures turn deadly as the action shifts from Washington, DC, to New England. His war is waged on a battlefield where the markers between the real and the imaginary are constantly shifting as he seeks escape in an alcoholic fog. To know Norman is to love him; to love him is to put your sanity, if not your life, in peril. He leaves bottles, beauties, and bodies in his wake as he wages his relentless assault on the world. Penitent, Norman seeks forgiveness from his earthly father, only to find him hopelessly lost in the miasma of Alzheimer's. He fights on, searching for love, knowledge, and God, while risking everything to the demons of selfishness, drunkenness, and despair. Teetering on the brink of extinction, he is driven by unseen forces to a final showdown at the Last Chance Saloon.