Such questions have never occurred to Jonathan Halifax, a computer consultant winding up a summer vacation in the Hamptons on Labor Day weekend in 1985. But his wife’s discovery in the family scrapbook of a childish drawing of stars strikes him as a dangerous omen — especially when she points out the message scribbled beneath, in his mother’s handwriting: “Not what he seems — he is a Communist.”

And after that ... well, you’ll have to read the story for the details, but you can expect to be taken on a series of unpredictable tours back and forth across the United States, and back and forth through the 1950s and the 1980s.

I wrote the first draft of this novel in 1992; a subsequent draft was rejected by a couple dozen literary agents in 1993. Aside from whatever criticisms they had of the story’s content, many of the reviewers were clearly annoyed by my departure from the normal style of writing and submitting a fiction manuscript. I had typeset the material, with multiple type fonts (for reasons you’ll understand if you read far enough into the document); they didn’t like that, and insisted that I produce something that resembled a double-spaced typewritten document, in Courier type. I had embedded photographs in the manuscript, which led one agent to remark: “Pictures are for comic books.” I had included footnotes about various bits of historical detail that I thought some readers might want to read, but others might want to skip; this, too, was declared unacceptable

Though I understood that “packaging” of a literary submission could be almost as important as the contents within the package, I was disappointed and frustrated by the demands to remove so much of the material I had worked hard to include. As it turned out, the manuscript was rejected by a couple dozen more agents even after I had re-packaged it in the traditional form; and by early 1994, I decided to put it aside and return to my “day job” of computer consulting and writing technical computer books.

But then the World Wide Web appeared, and I began toying with the idea of a multi-media, hyper-text novel. As you’ll see by looking at the organization of this HTML page, the main story — on a chapter-by-chapter basis — is presented in the central frame. From time to time, you’ll see footnote-style hyperlinks embedded in the material; you’re welcome to skip them, but if you click on them, you’ll find some commentary about interesting historical trivia of the time period when the story takes place. You’ll also see “normal” hyperlinks embedded in various parts of each chapter, which will take you — in true “surfing the ’Net style — off to various parts of the Web that provide additional information on people, places, or things mentioned in the story.

Since the story takes place during a decade that most of us have long forgotten (and many readers are too young to have experienced at all), I’ve provided links in the bottom frame to summaries of major political events, sports events, and other “factoids” of interest in the specific time-period for each chapter.

Any suggestions for improving the content or the presentation of the story will be gratefully accepted. Meanwhile, happy reading...

Continue to Chapter 1 . . .