Midnight Valiant: A Parable

A coming of age adventure devolves into a profoundly sad family saga of human longing for the Divine. 


Midnight Valiant is set in a time when our culture is just beginning its subtle shift away from patriarchy. It explores two generations – that from the morally relative 1960’s, and its progeny, coming of age in the Me-Generation of the 1980’s.


Hollow-eyed mothers, missing or broken fathers, warrior sons and powerful daughters are connected to each other by eerie repetitions and patterns, by costly redemption, and by a 1965 Plymouth Valiant.


Four college friends travel across the Great Plains prairie in the Valiant. Their destination: a Kansas wheat farm, home to Daniel O’Neill. Here they find Daniel’s uncle Lance, who lost a leg, a brother and the only woman he ever loved to Vietnam. He lives with bitterness and with Daniel’s mother Becky, a wise Wiccan and post-60’s flower child.


Our narrator is a naïf: John Gophe tumbles into a world where rules are fluid and convention is absent. His sweetness and Catholicism create his constant confusion and ultimately, his madness.


Gophe is the sidekick of Cib Carkus Adams, a high school football hero and all-American-boy. Adams is big, strong and loud. He loves life and he loves Nattie Sinclair, a beautiful, smart and funny co-ed. Her eyes are emerald, ringed in black, and remarkable; Gophe can barely bring himself to look at her. 


Gophe is engaging and sweet and good and naïve, but there is something not quite right about him. He believes he is a plagiarist. He becomes obsessed with sweeping dust only he can see. A total virgin, he thinks about sex often; he is infatuated with women and their bodies. But it’s an immature, “gawking at tits” attraction. Gophe ever remains a child about sex, just as his immature understanding of God as an old man (Mr. Somebody’s Dad) keeps him ever a child about spirituality. 


By the time Gophe has confused God, sex, women, and the sanctity of the Boys Club Barn, little is left except dust, chaos and the 1965 Plymouth Valiant.