A collection of stories
by
What happens when you're face-to-face with a truth that shakes you?
Do you accept it, or pretend it was never there?
Award-winning author Mark A. Rayner smudges the lines between realist and fabulist, literary and speculative in this collection of stories that examines this question-what Homer called passing through The Gates of Polished Horn.
We discover the cruelty of creating synthetic consciousness. A woman is worried that her husband is having an affair but discovers it's much, much worse. A time traveler uncovers a reality-bending fact while observing the death of Socrates. Waldo, of Where's Waldo fame, has an existential crisis. A traveling salesperson is killed on the highway, and this is just the start of his journey through the gates.
Infused with comic insight and tragic vision, this collection invites readers into new realities thattouch on our shared humanity.
Alex Good on The Toronto Star wrote:"Mark A. Rayner's formidable storytelling is on full display in this thoughtful and diverse collection. He's a fine and creative writer whose characters and storylines are quirky, inventive, and often very funny. Bravo!"
~Terry Fallis, two-time winner of the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour
"
The title for Mark Rayner’s whimsical yet unsettling collection of stories comes from the poet Homer’s notion that dreams come to us having passed through different gates depending on whether they’re true or not.
It’s a tricky poetic trope that fits with the way Rayner plays with the question of what’s real. His stories are like thought experiments, with imagined and reimagined histories (we begin with a time-traveler dropping in to witness the death of Socrates) and settings where technology, consciousness, memory and dreams all sort of blur together in a manufactured “datasphere” or “mediascape.”"
–Alex Good, for the Toronto Star
