The Pink Room

The world's leading physicist attempts to use string theory to bring his daughter back from the dead. A novel from award winning Maine journalist Mark LaFlamme.

From the Inside Flap

There. From a distance. Soft and faint like rain on the roof, a melody floated down from above. Notes that jabbed the air like probing fingers. A sound like fairies dancing in an acid dream. Fur Elise. For Cain, it was like stumbling into some terrible scene he might have written himself. His entire body went cold. He felt a pounding in his temples as the adrenaline of fright fueled his pulse. He was aware of a full bladder and had to concentrate to contain it. He fumbled with the sleeping bag zipper and squirmed out of it as though it were full of spiders. He knelt on the hard floor and strained to listen. Still the music played, the quick melody losing energy but still recognizable. Fur Elise from the snow globe, floating down from the very top of the turret. Beautiful, terrible music from the pink room. It wound down. I heard it wind down. There was not a single note left in those springs and cogs. He stood and pulled on a pair of jeans. He reached for the flashlight and switched it on. He aimed it at the staircase, terrified at what he might see there. But again, there were no leering faces or crouching ghouls. Only the darkness of the second floor. And above that, the turret from which the haunting melody continued to play. I can t go up there. I think I m physically incapable of climbing those stairs.

From the Back Cover

Angel Currie s bedroom is filled with little girl things. There are fuzzy pink toys on a soft, pink bed. There s a pink beanbag on the floor beneath hanging pink curtains. There s a dollhouse in the center of the room and a pink snow globe that plays Fur Elise. It is a place that any little girl would love. Even a dead little girl like Angel Currie. The Pink Room is a place where science meets terror. Theodore Currie is the world s top physicist. He is widely regarded as the man who might formulate the long-sought Theory of Everything. Only Currie has gone insane with grief. He has left laboratories and government grants behind him to conduct his greatest experiment of all. With soft, pink enticements, the science of string theory and the power of the cosmos, Currie intends to bring his beloved daughter back from a place eternally unreachable. The Pink Room is a place where genius meets insanity. Jonathan Cain is a writer with a story to tell and a dead wife to grieve. He has moved into the abandoned Currie house in the northern Maine woods. Nobody knows what happened to the delirious scientist in the final days of his experiment here. Cain aims to find out. While government agents lurk like scavengers, Cain is finding answers to the world s most profound secrets. Above all, he finds them in the Pink Room. There, surrounded by a little girl s cherished possessions, Cain has come to believe in science and magic. He has come to believe as he mourn his wife with the kind of fervor that can drive a sane man mad. The Pink Room is a place where lost loves come home. And you can t send them back. An absolutely chilling tale. Your fascination with the science will be rivaled only by fright. And few things are more frightful than terrors draped in pink.

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