Mark Beyer Novels

I write realistic fiction about men and women. Their relationships are the plot, but their characters are the story. All of these (and more) create what's otherwise called The Traditional Novel. These stories are long reads; sometimes they are dark stories. They are always sophisticated fiction inside complicated stories. This is ... fiction that stirs your imagination, your prejudices, your passion for the opposite sex.

MAX, THE BLIND GUY (2015)

This is the story of Maximilian and Greta Ruth, their 40-year relationship, and all the demons that show up as they find that life rarely goes according to plan.

Max daydreams in colors which his eyes can no longer see. His wife is leading them on a six-city European tour. Greta Ruth calls this trip their “last hurrah.” She hasn't had the best from 40 years with Max. But Max takes their life differently: marriage is an affair of more than the heart’s journey. This pair of American originals have known passion, riches, and sorrow. Today, these roads lead them through Europe’s famed cities, but Greta wonders if the plan will see her through to the promised “champagne on the Grand Canal.” 

Their Elite Travel tour-mates are getting on each other’s nerves. They are characters found next door, on everyday streets, under black-eye days, and across lost-memory nights. The highlights and sights, the posh lunches, the gamy conversation over drinks in the bar – and of course the "tour friendships" – all make their faux-camaraderie sometimes combative but never boring. A story rife with modern perils – too much time, too much money, just enough libido, secrets revealed – Max and Greta Ruth don’t wait for what the future may bring. 

Oft times a dark, anti-romance, Max, the blind guy is also the story of choices a husband and wife make, which, apart from their ardor and honor, erode trust but leave the fibers that do not allow them to pull away so easily; they must therefore feel their way toward some shared middle-ground.

Buy this story of Euro-travel and tragedy at GoogleBooks.

KOBO Digital Books has this very American story.

Available from Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk

Read an excerpt of Max, the blind guy not found at on-line shops.

WHAT BEAUTY (2012) 

How might the Olympian Gods change if we were to allow our imaginations to see their true ages? Time changes all people — even gods — and when their day-to-day mischievous lives no longer play a role in human affairs, what then do they become? The image of shriveled skin is too apt to ignore. And, above all, what do we associate with the aging of these gods within the condition of our modern times? 

Minus Orth has an idea which can explain this, and give our imaginations the figures to uphold. He is sculpting the mighty figures of myth — and the not-so-mighty — in an art cycle he has titled "Mythical Gods in Their Twilight" without the least irony. And his creations have not come without a price.   

One day Minus crosses paths with Karen Kosek, best remembered as a culture critic of the 1960s. Karen dropped out of sight years ago. Now she dresses as a bag lady — ragged clothes, a garbage smell, and bulging plastic bags she carries as if they hold the secrets to the good life. Minus orchestrates a tenuous relationship with Karen, and discovers in her a woman who has not been trampled underfoot, but is burrowed deeper in society’s crust than anyone could imagine. Thus begins an odyssey in which Minus becomes obsessed with Karen’s past and present, obsessed with creating his sculpture cycle, and with the role artists play in society’s split personality. 

“Do you have what it takes to make something beautiful?” is a question that comes to the minds of many characters in What Beauty. Their answers are hilarious, confused, self-delusional, virtuous, or simply truthful, because the people who create beauty are different from those who value beauty, and far afield from the powers able to help it flourish … or destroy it. 

Buy the story of this sculptor's work-life at Amazon.

GoogleBooks has this traditional novel for your bookshelf!

This American Tale is also available at KOBO digital books.

Read an excerpt of What Beauty not found at on-line shops.

THE VILLAGE WIT (2010) 

American Richard Bentley settles in rural England, looking for the contented life of a bookshop keeper and some fun with the local women. His wife of fourteen years left him out of “marital boredom,” so Heath-on-the-Wold seems the ideal place to get lost in work and forget the past. Bentley then hires Peggy White, a mid-forties townswoman who seems his match in sass and intellect. Soon, the rules of attraction open a new chapter in their lives.

The Village Wit follows Richard and Peggy’s often humorous and sometimes dark odyssey through village life, love’s fall, sexual politics, and that place where memory and modern love intersect. This novel explores, from the male point of view, the acts of love and its betrayal, loss and longing, and the steps one makes to find love again. 

Buy this sophisticated story at GoogleBooks.

KOBO Digital Books has this book-shop tale ready for you!

Also available as the best fiction from Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk

Read an excerpt of The Village Wit not found at on-line shops.

THE JANITOR: Or, DOSTOEVSKY IN AMERICAANITOR: Or, DOSTOEVSKY IN AMERICA (2020) 

Have you ever heard the story of the Hero turned Goat?

At sixteen, Ernest Waine is trapped in a world of hate. He cycles between knowing his friends and seeing enemies watching from the shadows. What has made me this way? he asks. An answer eludes him by day; at night he reads fantastic books in which he can only hope to learn some right path along the potholed roads leading to the end of the twentieth century.

The day Ernest opens Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky’s voice shouts at him over the noise made constant by his daytime life. What he hears from the Russian master-storyteller makes the case for his next move. Murder, on a notorious scale.

Twenty-five years later, Ernest is asked to recall the day in his life when he had planned to kill his classmates. This time he does not hear Dostoevsky speaking, but his own voice coming from behind the horror of what he had done, and what he hadn’t.

The Janitor: Or, Dostoevsky in America carries with it the passions of the frightened, the angry: those children compelled to react in the name of self-defined safety, and lone survival. Sometimes, the sum of all actions does not define a life.

“Let me tell you the one about the Goat turned Hero...”

This story of a high-school shooting gone wrong is for sale at GoogleBooks.

Read this dark story by buying from KOBO Digital Books.

Also available in print and ebook from Amazon.com