An Illustrated Novel by Colin Turner

” What looked like guns were pointed at the grate holding Eleanor upright. She had a jar full of ectoplasm in between her feet (to contain her soul while her “vessel of flesh” underwent electrocution). A set of wires snaked from the grillwork at her back into the top of the glassware. They would conduct her safely (if Conrad’s calculations were correct) out of her old self and return her into an altogether new one.” (Excerpt from Image)

The pictures of antique objects in IMAGE: An Illustrated Novel are glimpses into a twisted history. Caleb Mackay, as a boy and a budding artist in 1974, encounters a ghostly woman. He later swears, after struggling with it as an adult, to no longer study the figure. Instead, his subjects eerily point to the pretty victim of a demented doctor, the journal recording his research and a sadistic experiment turning his young employee forever ageless yet rarely visible in 1899. Although her spectral likeness eludes him after more than a century’s worth of horror, Caleb, by 2019, is still haunted.

Colin Turner

Colin Turner majored in art at the University of California at Davis. Studio models were common. After graduating, he saw how often nudity was sexual, exploitative or used to perpetuate who measures up and who is unfairly inferior. As a consequence, he worked on other projects. A printing industry career lasted twenty-five years and inspired a few books of his own (with the first two by D.C. Morrister, a pseudonym). Every issue that he had experienced with the body in his art reemerged in his writing.

IMAGE: An Illustrated Novel by Colin Turner is available in Kindle and paperback editions. Eighteen black-and-white illustrations serve as chapter headings. Every sketch represents a vintage item and repressed association.

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