The House of Nordquist

In The House of Nordquist, the final novel of The Eroica Trilogy, Eugene K. Garber creates his most demonic character of the series. Deep in the infernal regions of the bizarre house of his mad father, the Faustian Eric Nordquist conducts an atrocious experiment. He will extract from the body of a Holocaust victim sounds for a world-changing symphony.

Day after day he stands at his synthesizer transforming the sounds of a maimed body into appalling skeins of lachrymose reverberations. But his theft of the life force of his subject is not his only transgression. He sucks everyone around him into the vortex of his mad dream of a cleansing cataclysm. His most devoted follower Paul Albright not only assists in the experiment but becomes infected with unholy powers.

Now, years later, the House of Nordquist burned to the ground by an unknown arsonist, Eric is on the loose with the score of his abysmal symphony. Paul is in pursuit. Can Paul find Eric and the sinister score? If he does, what will he do?

The novels of The Eroica Trilogy share the common strategy of “genre iconoclasm.” In The House of Nordquist the conventions of Gothic fiction and mystery novels are radically skewed by the deflections of metafiction and indeterminacy.