aking beauty out of woe - this is the act of alchemy performed in Crepuscule, where Roman Payne paves derelict Parisian streets with flowers of the purest tones: from a packed swamp, he drags the flower and the mud alike - unearthing corpses while throwing sand at the stars. The novel opens its streets of misery for the reader to step in, and follows a pair of lovers in a French capital coming to life ghost-like as a stained curtain. Abandoned, damp bridges and their dwellers, streetlights and gutters, and a mesmerizing dusk falling in rains of sepia on the page.
David is stranded, penniless in the city, in a ragged suit and a terrible physical state. Nastya leaves her Russian hometown, invited to dance at the famous Opéra Garnier by request of a French nobleman. But sometimes one stumbles against one's dreams - and a city like Paris can turn great hopes into a heap of ash. The two youths will eventually meet through their struggle in the terrible beauty of the cannibal city, and decide to find a way to get out of it.
Crepuscule recovers a sense of the romance as meant by Hawthorne, linking a by-gone past with the very Present that is flitting away from us, and is a tale in the true sense. The story it tells is immemorial: the story of exile. Dusky love. Loss. Hope and misery. Listen to the voice of the storyteller. You'll hear how David travelled across an ocean inside a wooden box, how he wandered across the streets of Paris. You'll be told about Nastya, looking for the Opéra Garnier, the real nature of Docteur Moreaux's disease, and the silent songs of those who gaze at the Seine from its banks with rain for a shelter.
Roman Payne's narrative drive carries the tale to an intemporal Paris, reflecting glimpses of its essential bones. It is immemorial as an urban fable that was and will be told on and on, in all its own reflectory glimpses - moving in a river of words, dancing on a tight rope between laughter and tears. As a proper alchemist, Roman Payne molds his story with beatitude and misery blended, with a thrilling, vivid scope and a voice of his own - the voice of a true poet.