EYES IN THE MIRROR

An architect at an agonizing crossroads in life finds himself comatose and surrounded by spirit entities who enlighten him about God, the universe, and his own hardships. 

The debut novel by architect-turned-author Moore is a mystic-inspirational piece laden with autobiographical detail in the same vein as works by Dan Millman and Richard Bach. Narrator Zach Morgan is a middle-aged architect who has built a career and home life; he has congenitally malformed hands and has endured other personal travails. Now he and his pregnant wife, Sam, learn their child is developing with severe abnormalities in utero. With an agonizing choice of whether to terminate the baby, Zach accidentally falls—or not; it seems nothing is really “accidental” in the universe—and hits his head. He finds himself in “The Swing Between Worlds,” a place where he meets and discourses with spiritual entities who secretly guide all humanity (itself a divine experiment in Free Will) toward oneness. Domini, a sort of guardian-angel figure wrought out of Zach’s own soul, is the principle interlocutor, explaining how, as Zach vividly flashes back on all his joys and heartaches in various galleries, even the cruelest circumstances in his life were deliberately engineered boons steering him toward enlightenment. The protagonist doesn’t often take this Panglossian cosmology well since he relives childhood sexual molestation, a harshly authoritarian and unsupportive father, and overcoming his disability. Even readers who resist New Age stuff can take the passages of growing up as a well-described memoir of pain and triumph in the Tobias Wolff mold even as it bounds ahead in the final chapters into a fantastically distant future utopian America on “New Earth,” where humans have finally embraced inner godliness (and really good architecture). Readers expecting a stronger resolution on the abortion question (especially one in accord with Christian thinking) may be in for a surprise by the author’s take on the issue. The book includes a suggested reading list that cites such self-help/New Age stalwarts as Paramahansa Yogananda, Neale Donald Walsch, Carlos Castaneda, and Eckhart Tolle. 

Well-constructed entry in the New Age/inspirational genre; check your cynicism at the lintel.