Circling Toward Nightfall

In the lyrical novel Circling Toward Nightfall Jeremiah Coombs, its narrator, may be the only man on earth who has two fathers. After being told by Billy Coombs, his father, that he had no mother, Jeremiah’s paternal grandmother discloses that her name was Bernadette who died in childbirth even though Jeremiah vividly recalls her in his early life. A neighbor, “Ichabod” Ernest Tyner, begins to play an increasing role in his life. Ichabod reveals that Bernadette was a Sisters of Conscience nun who gave birth to the boy on the banks of the Ohio River and then drowned herself. When how he was conceived is revealed, a patricidal urge propels Jeremiah to seek vengeance. It is at this juncture that the novel’s truth shows itself. With characters that flow in and out of it, the novel is an enigma.

ADVANCED PRAISE

Dennis Must’s Circling Toward Nightfall is not a standard novel. Rather it is a lyrical rendering of the myth of blood and family. It is a literary reconciliation of the mind/body dualism that has plagued humans from the beginning on our search for origins. The reader of CTN has to drop into mythic mind  to see what the author is doing because Must’s language works on so many levels—mythic, psychological, teleological, whimsical, poetic, biological—that the reader is taken on a journey of discovery that ends with…”one man clinging onto another for dear life…levitating away from the assembled dead, rising above Ohio Valley’s Sunday graveyard … escaping its pull of ennui and malaise.”

Rich in metaphor, concrete in its images, Circling Toward Nightfall opens the reader to the sheer joy of gorgeous writing. It is a novel that requires a commitment from the reader who wants to reap the rewards of great writing—and those rewards are multiple and deep. CTN is a masterpiece.
—Jack Remick, author of Blood; Gabriela and The Widow; and Man Alone

Dennis Must’s posthumously published novel Circling Toward Nightfall is a “late style” coming-of-age story; the age-coming is the “long sleep of death.” Written in compact prose, almost prose poetry, every word counts. Populated by a cacophony of voices from the author’s unconscious, we are told: “The Lafayette Hotel … where your name bears no relevancy . . .  where identities are cribbed from a graveyard of signatures, and doppelgangers cram its hallways lost.” Crafted in mystery genre in the guise of Jeremiah or Jeremiahs, from “Lesson One” to the end of the book, Must’s late style circles its own demise and carries faint echoes of Western humanity’s predicament.
—Rich Murphy, author of Mind of Europe and Americana