B. A. Arey

When a man's mind is a labyrinth of lies, can a single truth set him free?

For Jude, reality is a fractured hall of mirrors. Split into a chorus of three souls—Mi, Mesuf, and Aigh—he navigates the world in the first-person plural, haunted by a past that refuses to stay fixed. With a plan to make today his last, Jude summons a ghostly companion, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, to guide him through a philosophical descent into the streets of an unnamed German city, a city cast in the shadow of Dante's Inferno.

But this is no ordinary journey. As the day unfolds in a binge-eating haze and a series of frantic walks, Jude's past as a US Army veteran collides with his philosophical present. The novel's structure is as broken as its narrator, blending novelistic prose with the dialogue of a play, and shifting effortlessly between English, German, and memory. The narration itself is an unreliable witness, constantly questioning itself and its own validity.

Yet, in a world where everything is a construct and the past is an illusion, a strange form of hope begins to emerge. In a final act of transformation, Lessing is replaced by the postmodernist Julio Cortázar, and the collective "we" of Jude's mind gives way to a single, fragile "I." This is the story of a shattered man who, on the road to destruction, finds the first, tentative steps toward a new kind of salvation.

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Here you can find some of my shorter stories, both published and unpublished.

Here you can find some of my poetry, the most difficult thing to write and the least well understood.

Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate