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Artist Angus Macpherson crosses into the literary world with 'Struck by Lightning'
You probably will do a double take when you read this name as the author of a new novel.
The name is Angus Macpherson, author of the short, self-published novel, “Struck by Lightning.”
You may wonder, “That can’t be right. Isn’t Angus Macpherson a celebrated Albuquerque visual artist?”
Indeed. Macpherson has been a painter for more than four decades.
This year, at the age of 73, Macpherson has stepped outside of the world of visual art and slipped into the world of the literary with his debut novel.
His interest in writing was stirred when one of his daughters, a scriptwriter, would send him and his wife her movie scripts to comment on.
About eight years ago, Macpherson started writing short stories, but none have been published. Yet.
But his novel, he said, began with him shaping the second chapter as a short story. “I got feedback on it and then went back and wrote the first chapter,” he said in a phone interview.
“I like short stories. They have full arcs in a few pages.”
From there he started piecing the chapters together to form the novel, all 83 pages of it.
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Macpherson said his development as a writer was influenced by heeding the advice on writing that famous authors Stephen King and George Saunders have supplied.
Macpherson’s book is a “road” novel in the tradition of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road.” It’s also a story of a young man in his 20s, just out of college, in search of himself.
He’s hitchhiking solo across the country from Oregon, through the Rockies and east to a music-filled community, probably in North Carolina or Virginia, Macpherson said.
Each chapter has its share of harrowing adventures and situations.
You may ask, does the protagonist have a name? He has a nickname, Scribbles, but he doesn’t have a first or last name until two pages before the end of the novel. On page 81 he’s identified as Justice Moore. The name holds no special meaning, nor does the belatedness of the naming, Macpherson said.
The first chapter shows the protagonist’s heartbreak when his girlfriend breaks up with him. Then he jumps into an 18-wheel tractor-trailer with open slat sides driven by Allen, a fellow laid-off construction worker.
The truck is jammed with hundreds of mannequins in athletic poses. The mannequins were from a recently bankrupt sporting goods chain. What follows is a chaotic action scene.
They come around a bend in the road. Ahead is a herd of elk.
Allen blew the horn, but the elk remained motionless. He hit the brakes.
The rig weaved. Allen turned the wheel, “but the trailer whipped around and for a moment the entire rig traveled sideways. The trailer hit three elk and ripped open the tailgate latch. Allen turned the wheel hard to make a correction, and we spun one and a half times around, spewing mannequins — swimmers, runners and basketball stars, some cartwheeling, some upside down, some holding each other in a final dance.”
Several elk are roadkill. What follows is a coincidence. The protagonist’s former girlfriend is in a sports car driven by her new beau. They’re coming the other way on the same road minutes after the truck-elk collision.
Allen decides to return the truck to its origination point. But the protagonist heads east on foot.
In the next chapter the protagonist describes changes in the weather: “First it was pounding rain, puddles on the highway, puddles in my shoe. Someone picked me up anyway. I was a dripping mess in my poncho and large backpack.”
Another chapter describes a severe snow storm that causes the truck he’s in to flip.
Macpherson has a knack for constructing bursts of dialogue that feature oddball characters. Such as this one of a sheepherder: “The guy who did stop at sunset was whiskery and sunburnt purple. His car smoked and belched, and he too smoked and belched.”
A later chapter describes the protagonist’s heart-stopping experience of getting struck by lightning.
First, he relates, part of the eastern horizon darkened. It was followed by “a bass drum thump of thunder” that resonated through his body. The air above him was moving yet the air around him was still. A few drops of rain hit his head.
Then, “A flash. Big. Everything, every place, white. A cosmic door opened, too bright for humans, all-encompassing. Eardrum-splitting thunder. I was hit hard. I dropped into indigo blue. Floating in nothing. Then my ears rang a loud warning. Then silence.”
Then the protagonist escapes a fire in a restaurant where he works. He heads to a railroad track with his recently purchased guitar. On the side of a slow-moving train, he loses his grip on the guitar, which falls and is damaged.
A detail of a Macpherson painting on the front cover shows a jagged lightning bolt below a cloud.
In the concluding chapter his broken guitar is repaired, his music is appreciated, and his broken romantic life restored with a new woman.
Macpherson said the novel is not autobiographical, though he did hitchhike for 10 weeks in the fall of 1974 when he was 22. He thumbed rides around continental Europe and Great Britain.
