Publisher's Synopsis
Traveling to a ghost town, a software engineer becomes trapped in a mystery -- but she plans a mind-bending escape... Deus ex Machina; Logos is a haunted book. Legends of gold still echo across the Rocky Mountains. When a software engineer for a printing company, takes a vacation and writes about a journey to find a hidden book, will she find gold? Follow the traces to an abandoned train depot in a ghost town. Discover computer innovations of America resonating in a spectral link between the golden legends of New Spain and the metamorphic myths of Pompeii. From the phantasms of software encryption to the geometrical precision of Anasazi ruins, this book keeps you searching far beyond the idea of a fiction. As complex and intriguing as an Umberto Eco novel, Charles Sauer's metafiction is a literary work that operates on several levels. In one aspect an entertaining horror story about the ghost of a woman trapped inside a book, it is also a philosophical inquiry about myths, archetypes, and fiction. It challenges contemporaneous ideas, asking the question: Does a tangible object -- like this novel -- mirror reality in such a way to suggest that essence precedes existence? Or is the question itself a trap? The author seamlessly weaves timeless myths like the tragic love story between Narcissus and Echo with contemporaneous themes like the manipulation of information and identity theft. Further, Sauer unprecedentedly and poetically embeds software source code within the story! Solve the mystery: Read the fascinating Deus ex Machina.
