Cafe Milonga

Is Ernest Pendala cursed? If you enjoy a read full of twists, turns, and events in which you the reader are not certain of dream or reality, Café Milonga is for you. From the time Ernest, a grieving widower, buys a derelict guitar his perception of reality becomes skewed. He struggles to differentiate between dream and waking states. He becomes an unwilling character in a recurring nightmare. A tragic accident has removed the one person in Ernest Pendala's life whom he adored with all his heart. Desperate to hang onto her essence, to keep it alive, he moves to a place she had loved in life. But once there, Ernest settles into a morbid, ritualized existence. In an attempt to divert what he recognizes as self-defeating thoughts and behaviors he buys a badly damaged guitar with the hope of repairing it. Yet, shortly after buying the guitar unusual events begin occurring. Events in which he believes himself a participant, sometimes the perpetrator of a brutally lethal act and the victim of a conspiracy. He is plagued with visions in which the dead come alive and tell him or act out their story. And they don't just come to him while asleep. He agonizes over them. Are they merely ill-timed nightmares, waking-dreams, or hallucinations-indications of an unstable mind? Or is there something else, something real, behind them? Driven by the need to find the answer, the need to end the nightmare, the need to find peace, Ernest travels to what he believes to be its source. And there he realizes a promised future. But once again the reality of his own existence shifts.