The Professor of Aesthetics - Tapa dura

In May of 1932, at Farrells' Boarding House in the small mountain resort of Christina, a handsome stranger presents his card: "Jay Skikey, Professor of Aesthetics and Elocution." For Morris and Edna Farrell, brother and sister, and for Justus Bechner, their only boarder, this new arrival represents a magic long absent from their lives, or never encountered to begin with. Only Callan McAlpern, the town mortician, recognizes Skikey for what he is: a man bearing Hell in his wake.
From the battlefields of World War I to the citadel of Al Capone's gangster empire, the Professor of Aesthetics reveals the tortured pasts of Edna, of Morris, of Jay Skikey himself: secrets of violence, betrayal, lost passion and flickering hope. In his brooding and allusive novel of almost Jacobean intensity, Christopher T. Leland confronts the power of evil and the immanence of death, and love's final, ironic capacity to transcend them.

Christopher T. Leland is Professor of English at Wayne State University.