Dangerous Blues

Paul Brickner and his twelve-year-old daughter Spring are subletting an apartment in New York City. They came to escape the sorrow of their empty house in upstate New York after Nadia, Paul's wife and Spring's mother, dies.

Spring quickly takes to her new Manhattan middle school life, including making a new friend, Irina. Through that connection, Paul meets Irina's mother, Tara White, a blues singer, and perhaps just the spark Paul has been missing.

But Paul begins to fear that he is being haunted by Nadia, who appears to him in fleeting images. Is he imagining it, or is she real? Tara, who grew up in the inscrutable New England cult known as the Dream People, is haunted, too, hounded by her very real brothers to return to the family, and to give back the magical object—a shamanic Tibetan vessel—that they claim she stole from them.

Paul's cousin Hank, a disreputable art dealer, becomes obsessed with this object. Meanwhile, Paul's father-in-law, an expert on occult lore, tries to steer Paul toward resolution with Nadia's ghost.

Driven by Paul's new circle of odd and free spirited iconoclasts, Dangerous Blues asks the question: when do you let go, and what are you willing to let go of?

What people are saying:

"Stephen Policoff is so singular in so many ways—as the first writing teacher I ever had;  as a seer of the ineffable, the unbearable, and the unexpectedly comedic; as a conjuror of no less than the extra-terrestrial—that I'm driven to the thesaurus, to lists of the like, in an effort to pinpoint his difference: 'Nonconformist'? 'Rara avis'? 'Maverick'?  All kind of work but none does the trick. He's Stephen Policoff, for heavens' sake!—a joy to know and to read. So just read him and know!"

—Susan Choi, National Book Award winner for Trust Exercise. Pulitzer Prize finalist for American Woman

"Stephen Policoff's wildly creative new novel is the absolute perfect chord of magic, a wifely ghost, a bit of shamanism and a lot about human bonds and beliefs, all set against the backdrop of a Village blues club. Filled with a father's palpable love for family and for all the mysteries that just might be out of reach, Dangerous Blues might be billed as kind of a ghost story but it's a total kind of a knockout read." 

—Caroline Leavitt, New York Times bestselling author of With or Without You