David Raffin

Lonesome Travelers: Guide to City / Forest - Sex Robot Trilogy David Raffin

A teenage girl comes to read at a nursing home and is assigned to an elderly man no one ever visits. She doesn't want to be here. It's a court order. She interrupts him in his spartan room where he is staring out the window at a great bird in the smoky afternoon haze. Instead of her reading to him, he starts to tell her a story. The story is about the trickster Rabbit, condemned by the Fates to act as the fourth incarnation of Fire. His twin Brother, his shadow, is jealous of him and locks him away in a special box where he burns alone, consuming himself. The Rabbit's best friend, Mister Love, is a great bird, a brood parasite, an orphan. He is forming an army of love to liberate his friend Rabbit, and to protect Rabbit's heir. His duty is clear. He is to adopt lost souls, those capable of giving love even if they have never received it. He travels with his people, ghosts, artists, and revolutionaries. Rabbit's heir is a girl who lives alone, a refugee, in a land of perpetual darkness, in which she is the only burning light. She is visited only occasionally by her abusive father. But one night Mister Love visits with all of his interns, and they offer to be her chosen family, if she wants them. Now she emerges into a world she does not know and is shown this world as-it-is, communicated to her through parable and song. She visits her sister in the under-world, and travels the world and through time, down darkened alleyways which twist, turn, and circle back, examining it, though she has forgotten herself. But as she travels she is being directed by Rabbit and Mister Love. What will she make of their world, after? Post-traumatic stress expressed as a grim fairy-tale, a ghost story, a tragic comedy; Lonesome Travelers breaks down the past as legend and song. Love has taken hold of them, Love, who is filled to the brim, Cuckoo, but is not exactly what it seems. And the girl in the house, raised in darkness, protected and educated by Love's Lonesome Travelers, is ready to rise up.