Half Way Island [*SIGNED*]

Dallas TX: The Story Book Press. Very Good in Very Good- dj. (c.1953). First Edition. Hardcover. [moderate shelfwear, lower rear corner bumped, tiny white stain at upper left corner of front cover; the jacket is edgeworn and surface-scuffed]. INSCRIBED generically ("Many happy hours of pleasant / enjoyable reading") and SIGNED by the author on the front endpaper. A very strange sort of religious-fantasy novel -- "a story of faith and adventure" -- in which the narrator (a woman) is recruited by a "Messenger" to go on a kind of rescue mission to locate a half-dozen Angels and Messengers who had been sent to Earth to collect a particular Chicago native (referred to only as "J.D.") after his death, but who had all failed to complete their mission and had gone missing. The hang-up seemed to be this Half Way Island place, described in the text as being situated "half-way between Heaven and earth," where, according to "an old established Universal law," every traveler through space (including Messengers and Angels) had to stop off and subject him/her/itself to the local bureaucracy, and secure a permit (adjudicated by a jury trial!) in order to continue on their way. (As described in the book, this system seems positively Kafkaesque.) This "island" is apparently a planet of some kind, and yet at the beginning of the book our protagonist gets there by *driving* for three days, so go figure. Once she gets there, she's granted special status as a mortal (because everybody else passing through is either dead or is some kind of spiritual entity.) It just gets weirder and weirder, as she comes under the tutelage of the Chief Examiner (who's sort of like the mayor of the island), who dubs her "Kitten" and refers to her by that name as she's sent along on her multi-pronged rescue mission. The rest of the book seems somewhat Alice-in-Wonderland-ish, as she encounters a wide variety of individuals and additional authority figures. It might be possible to make sense of it all by reading from beginning to end, but a better strategy might be to just skip to the end, where you'll find a a 4-page supplement in which the author explains it all for the reader, or at least tries. "This story is based on a dream," she begins, "or perhaps I should say on a series of dreams that have been carefully written down as they occurred, saved, collected and put in consecutive order. ... It is a story full of imagination, blending fact with fiction that dovetails beautifully. Nobody can say that this is fact and that is fiction unless they happen to know where one ends and the other begins. Since in this case, such a thing is obviously impossible one must draw his own conclusion." That I leave to you, lucky you. Signed by Author .