Double Entendre: Two Bright Novellas About Shady Religion

About the Book

In BEYOND THE PALE, Nigel Swain, a gay Unitarian minister, is found dead in black pigskin, crushed by a garbage truck. His Boston friends: Clarissa, Mirabelle, Naomi, Roger, Penelope, and Bruno are determined to find the culprit. Their efforts are complicated when Neville, Nigel’s identical twin, arrives from Africa followed soon by his wife Dahlia, who has fled from a harem on the Persian Gulf.

This comic murder mystery includes a papal TV series, a psychotic biography, and a primer on wayward theology. The interlocking plots thicken, congeal, and finally liquefy in a dance club called the Ides. Here persons of uncertain gender mix and match togas to centurions. In a mad and topsy-turvy world, BEYOND THE PALE gives chaos a reputable name.

In THE POWERS THAT BE, Simeon and Ann are gifted with clairvoyance and genius IQs. Eager to fall in love with an equal, they meet through a Personals ad and find themselves perfectly matched. But the diabolic Benito Fosco is intent on seducing them in his Sutton Place apartment planted like the Garden of Eden with shrubs, an apple tree, and cascading water. Later, to secure their allegiance, Benito offers Simeon and Ann all the kingdoms of New York.

The genesis of this farce is the vulnerability of our latter-day Adam and Eve who are lured into easy submission. Enter Mick Deangelis, angelic hunk and protector, whose hand-to-hand combat with Benito is not unlike the grappling of the sacred with the profane, and the abyss where the warfare is waged.

About the Author

Joseph Roccasalvo followed his graduate degrees in Philosophy, English Literature, and Theology with a Harvard Ph.D. in Comparative Religion and a specialty in Buddhism. He has lived and taught in Boston, Bangkokm and Chicago. For ten years in New York City, he was a professor of religious studies at Fordham University's Bronx and Lincoln Center Campus. He was also visiting professor of Buddhism in Lugano, Switzerland. Now engaged in full-time teaching, he devotes himself to two alliterative loves: prose and pastoral work. A hospital chaplaincy and seven novels ensued: Fire in a Windless Place, Beyond the Pale, Chartreuse, Portrait of a Woman, The Devil's Interval, The Powers that Be, and the Odor of Sanctity. These were followed by two books of short stories, Outwards Signs and The Mansions of Limbo; a play, Waging Waugh, and a memoir, As It Were.