Mark Hayes

Passing Place Mark Hayes

Step in from the cold, through the saloon door of the strangest bar in creation.

"The Greyhound pulled away into the thunderous summer storm, leaving in its wake a dishevelled, world-weary figure in the dark, deserted bus station."

In a Hicksville town in the western desert Richard is a man come to the end of the road. Grieving after the death of his wife he has travelled the back roads of America in search of an answer to that most impossible of questions. Why? Looking for that answer in all the wrong places. Until he answers a want ad for a piano player and finds himself in Esqwith's Passing Place, an impossible bar, where the patrons all have stories to tell.

In the Passing Place, causality is just a set of rules and those rules can be bent. Where no one knows your name, but everyone has a story to tell. Where the answers to that most impossible of questions may lay, 'Why?' In a novel that goes everywhere and nowhere, but is about the journey in-between.

So Welcome to Esqwith's Piano Bar and Grill. A Passing Place. A place off to one side of reality, where your troubles can just slip on by.
An impossible place that bridges dimensions and time itself. Sonny, the doorman, drinks his brandy and tells a story of death row. A green haired girl sits in her tree and speaks of the wolf of winter. The 'Weaver Of Tears', cries her diamonds, and the Gunslinger speaks of death riding in on desert winds. The Greyman tells of his soulless world, before dancing with his mop once more. While in the kitchen the Chef bends causality to make the greatest sandwich in the world, and the devil behind the bar tells tall tales while he pours you a drink.

A place where stories are told and retold anew, and a place where something lurks unseen, something from the void, something dangerous, something hungry, something red...

Fantasy and sci-fiction collide with horror and the supernatural in a world where reality is a matter of perception...



"...swimming in a rich sea of worlds..."

"...creepily beautiful..."

"...keep's you drawn into the web of the story..."