| CHANGELING'S RETURN Travis Edward Pike Otherworld Cottage Industries, 2019, 257 pp.  Travis Pike should be a familiar name to UT readers by now having been the subject of several interviews and reviews in these pages covering his sixties garage adventures in Boston with Travis Pike & the Brattle Street East (featured in the 1966 teen movie Feelin’ Good), Travis Pike’s Tea Party (whose ’68 single “If I Didn’t Love |
You Girl” packs dance floors to this day), as well as his work as an author and publisher. Changeling’s Return is his newest gift to the world, a novel that draws on his experiences as a musician and also stirs in elements of fantasy and the supernatural. Sub-titled “a novel approach to the music,” Changeling’s Return started out in 1975 as a theatrical concept album, was revived in 1987 as Morningstone, before being turned into a screenplay, and finally this novel. Like Pike, the book’s protagonist, Morgen, was raised in Boston and is the lead singer and songwriter of a band—not the Tea Party, but Beantown Home Cookin’—and the setting is not the sixties but the present day. While on tour in England, the story takes a strange turn after Morgen finds himself marooned in a remote hamlet called Morningstone steeped in ancient occult practices—shades of The Wicker Man or HP Lovecraft. There he experiences a dramatic mystical epiphany that changes his life’s purpose, his songwriting and the band’s music completely, resulting in all kinds of fallout and friction with those around him. It’s a compelling story with many surprising turns, and a powerful message about mankind’s impact on the environment and the urgency of changing course. (Mike Stax) |
