Ghost Crab

About the Book

Following his death in the fiery explosion of his research boat, Max Nordstein discovers himself existing as a spirit trapped inside a ghost crab. The ghost crab is not impacted in the slightest way by carrying Max's spirit and is totally unaware Max is along for the ride. But Max experiences, in living detail, every aspect of the ghost crab's life while having no control over the crabs physiology, behavior, or existence in general. Frightened and bewildered, he gropes for understanding. Insight arrives from Peaches, a deceased woman, whose spirit is also living in a ghost crab. While falling in love with her at the spiritual level, Maxs crab engages her crab in some rowdy crustacean sex.

Peaches explains to Max it is the fate of all humans to spend their afterlife as a spirit located inside an animal. There they experience the life of the host animal while concurrently reviewing and analyzing their recently completed human existence. The analogy is made to an unemployed actor reviewing his last effort on the stage as he prepares for his next role. This psychotherapy in the afterlife, is done to understand the obscured reasons for ones actions in the past life. Once recognizing the karmic forces that shaped the past life, and formulating a plan for the next life, the spirit is ready to be reincarnated.

Max reviews his life from his birth in Norway to a Jewish woman married to a Norwegian scientist, through his family's emigration to the United States in 1963, and beyond. His life ends at the age of thirty-nine when his boat, the phenomenal R/V Gaea, mysteriously explodes while exiting Fort Lauderdale. Max tells his story through a series of flashbacks to his past two lives. Insight is also gained from the stories told by influential characters from his previous lives. We see how people alive during World War Two and earlier  had a major karmic impact on what made Max the person he became.

Because all spirits existing in the afterlife are like unemployed actors, whose last show was the life they recently completed, there is honesty and humor as they discuss their last performance with Max and Peaches. When Max learns, through a series of shocking revelations, what his former life was really all about, he is finally ready to be reborn.

Ghost Crab is like no book you have ever read. In a mostly lighthearted manner, it offers an alternative approach to the more conventional views regarding the development of personality and human consciousness. Regardless of whether you are a Christian, a Jew, a Moslem, or the most fervent atheist as long as you have an open mind you will say: This could be!

About the Author

From his earliest days as a kid growing up near Jamaica Bay in New York City to his mature years living on a houseboat in Florida, water has always held the author’s fascination. As a marine ecologist he spent his career studying water pollution. It is his knowledge of water, along with his background in science, travel, and his own unique human experiences, that form the foundation of his novel Ghost Crab.