Luke is the product of a religious and domineering mother. She rules his life with a unreasonably stern iron hand. Luke eventually rebels and in the process kills his mother and in a sense his father. Guilt and remorse haunt him for the rest of his life, but so does the knowledge that monsters exist as women ( and men ) who subjugate their children, making them helpless emotional and physical slaves. He flees after killing his mother to commit one murder after another, and from one love affair after another. He, like Tom Jones, is irresistible to women another curse from his parentage. When he sees victims of child abuse, like the Ancient Mariner, he knows instinctively what is going on and like the Mariner he is honor-bound to correct the problem.
A propos de l’auteur
The author, after a mundane life which grows ever closer to the end, has looked back on it and decided that he needs to do something of note – even just slightly of note, so he has written a novel or two or three. This is his first. He was a teacher, a painter of some small talent (his webpage is robsgeocrylics.com, or andartbybob.com, which can be found by looking them up on Google) The self-portrait is a painting he did some years ago and, like many of the pictures of authors, it is hopelessly out of date. He no longer looks like that. Nor does he want to. The picture was painted during his look like Hemingway period. He has always been a would-be writer, and has written much during his life. When he first submitted this novel to an agent she asked to see the whole work, and eventually rejected it, saying it was a ‘project’. I was rather amused as I rather thought that all thrillers were merely ‘projects’. Anyway, This is my ‘project’ revised, but not much.