The Mourning of the Magicians - Paperback

by Gary Jonathan Janis (Author)

In 2016 I began writing a screenplay titled The Devouring. Having had completed the work, I attempted, as best as I could, to find an agent to represent and move this script into the hands of an innovative and interested moviemaker. But, alas, that has not yet happened. I would love to see this work of fiction brought to the big screen; I do believe that it would be a smashing success if it found its way there. The Devouring is an exotic and complicated story that begins in 1944, at the Auschwitz concentration camp, and finds its conclusion in 2021, at the inauguration of the 46th President of the United States in Washington, D.C. The story tells of a character named Darius, a character who tells us about his life estranged from the world of human kind. He is a vampire, but not the type of vampire that one has had innumerable and familiar elbow, or should I say, neck rubbings with. Darius's vampirism is distinctive all together. And the historical voyage that he takes us on proves that with an unearthly blueprint. In this slim volume, in Part I, I have distilled many of the poetic attributes of the dialog of my screenplay into small works that I call prosetry. Part II is a new work, traveling down an unknown path. Seeming to be very short, short stories, these literary bijous call out to the reader as, methinks, like vagabond poems who care not for poetry. To Rimbaud and Baudelaire I throw a dark red kiss Un bisou pour les morts.

Author Biography

Gary Jonathan Janis is an author of two novels, "Paris Green" and "Desire and Fear," and a full-length screenplay "The Devouring." When he lived in Chicago, he was an interviewer for Publisher Charles "Chuck" Renslow's Chicago GayLife newspaper in the 1980s. Among his many interviews for Chicago GayLife, were with then underground film maker John Waters; the now dead but still notorious Divine; the auteur and author of Hollywood Babylon, Kenneth Anger; the always chic and outrageous author Fran Lebowitz; and the late Vito Russo, a film historian best remembered for his book "The Celluloid Closet."