At the tone

Imagine you’re a relatively young widow. Your husband passed away just a year ago. It’s been a tough go, but you’ve accepted it, begun to emerge; you’ve even found a new love, perhaps, and... out of the blue a stranger calls you with news of a “miracle” your dead husband performed. A woman’s legs, severed at the knees in an automobile accident, have begun to grow back after she (mistakenly) invoked your husband in prayer. What would you do? Slam the phone down in anger at this callous prank? That’s what Angie Carey, the heroine of At the Tone, does.

But what if it were true? What if you saw evidence of that impossibility— a woman’s amputated legs growing back? And what if there were other “miracles” attributed to bad old profane Solly Carey — the comatose regaining consciousness at his command, at least one person being... raised from the dead...?

Charles S. Kraszewski’s At the Tone examines problems of rationalism and belief, love and letting go, all the while keeping its focus on the difficulties faced by those left behind, who witness their loved one being not so much raised to the altar, as turned into a cash-cow for unscrupulous hawkers of religion and an idol for the desperate, who break into their home from time to time in search of “relics.”

Set in the same fictional city of Wixburn as his apocalyptic farce Accomplices, You Ask? with a cast of characters containing some familiar names, like the enigmatic government operative? murderer? lunatic? Harold Johnson, and told with the same acerbic wit that marks his earlier novel, At the Tone is a thought-provoking read that will make you laugh, as well as meditate on things that... you might not want to think about.

Charles S. Kraszewski writes in English and Polish. His first novel, Accomplices, You Ask? was published by Montag Press in 2022. Besides that, he has published three volumes of poetry in English (Beast, Diet of Nails, Chanameed) and two in Polish (Hallo, Sztokholm and Skowycik). He is a literary translator, mainly from Polish, Czech, and Slovak. In 2023, he was awarded the Gloria Artis medal by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Poland. He lives somewhere in Europe.