<p><strong>Heather and the Jabberwocky</strong></p><p><em>An Amorous Journey into the Mythical Antiquity of Now</em></p><p>A vengeful stalker tracks lovely Heather mercilessly from Hong Kong to France to Georgia as her artist husband fends off a Mexican drug cartel&rsquo;s attempts to disrupt their tranquil academic lives. It&rsquo;s an intelligent fantasy, a daunting mystery and a tantalizing adventure in literary fiction, told with a tongue-in-cheek sense of humor.</p><p>All hope for Heather depends on the Jabberwocky, a nonsense poem written by Lewis Carroll. When Alice of Alice&rsquo;s Adventures in Wonderland reads the poem, she says, 'Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas -- only I don&#39;t exactly know what they are.&rdquo; Heather escapes the Caribbean monster Lusca only to rise to the heights of an Aztec sacrificial pyramid. In her desperation she discovers unfathomable ideas from her mind. They aren&rsquo;t understood until made visual by her artist husband. Or is that another illusion from behind the looking glass? As with Alice, everything mirrors everything.</p><p>The reflective answers lie in the characters created by the author. As in earlier novels, described by critics as &ldquo;marvelously extraordinary, eccentric and bizarre,&rdquo; Peter Kelton&rsquo;s characters emerge from their regular roles in life and slowly unmask their true selves from the cover of a stealthily constructed delusion &ndash; that idiosyncratic impression firmly maintained despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality. For one character, tis a symptom of mental disorder; or is it?</p><p>In &ldquo;Heather and the Jabberwocky&rdquo; Kelton&rsquo;s characters are indeed marvelously extraordinary, eccentric and bizarre. They are just as real as Studs Terkel&rsquo;s real folks in &ldquo;The Great War.&rdquo; Instead of a war to bind them together, they share the odyssey of a fantasy.</p><p>&nbsp;&ldquo;Heather and the Jabberwocky&rdquo; is a companion to a seven-novel bookshelf that also includes &ldquo;Splat!&rdquo; &ldquo;A Light in Polanco,&rdquo; &ldquo;The Trevor Truculence,&rdquo; &ldquo;Reminds Me of My Innocence,&rdquo; &ldquo;The Junk Yard Solution&rdquo; and &ldquo;The Yesterlings,&rdquo; written in a span of 50 years after Lewis H. Lapham, editor of Harper&rsquo;s, wrote to the author&rsquo;s agent, &ldquo;I love the way Kelton writes.&rdquo; Psychologist B. G. Stice wrote in a review of Kelton&rsquo;s first novel, in 2006. &ldquo;The author is a master of plot twists. His writing is lyrical and stunning in its simplicity. He draws characters with a thin pencil and leaves the rest to your imagination. And he&#39;s not above pulling your leg.&rdquo; &ldquo;Splat!&rdquo; has been described as &ldquo;a surrealistic, erudite literary novel of romantic intrigue set on the slippery approaches to the dot.com era.&rdquo;</p>