He’s Peter, she’s Wendy, but this is no storybook romance. From the first pages of Bring Your Lover Back, the rockiness of this relationship is palpable—even before the reader learns of the small velvet box stuffed deep in Peter’s jacket pocket. But Peter’s ability to delude himself sends him on a journey of desperate efforts to win her—or someone—to love.
The story launches at New Year’s. After rejecting Peter’s proposal, Wendy flees to her apartment. Peter curls up on her step in the snow for the night. The next day, first his sister and then his oldest friend try to steer Peter toward reality. Which lands him in the client chair of a storefront psychic whose ad promises she can “bring your lover back.”
Enter the third player in an odd love triangle: a green-eyed young woman with a cloud of flyaway blond hair who “fiddles with the cascade of gold rings on all ten of her fingers, setting off an explosion of nervous shimmers.”
Peter leaves the psychic with directions for a ritual. And the next day, there she is: Wendy on Peter’s doorstep. Peter, true to form, misinterprets her every word and gesture and rushes back to the psychic. (“I was granted an emergency meeting mainly by refusing to leave.”)
This is when the psychic takes up the seemingly Sisyphean effort of pointing Peter in the general direction of reality. Her reward: becoming the object of his obsessive affection.
Getting to know Peter means joining his loving and exasperated circle of friends, family, and acquaintances, who alternate between wanting to hug and to throttle him. (Colin accuses him of love addiction, “the most boring kind of addict you can be.”) Each character enters the story fully formed, with hints at their own rich histories. (“How is this happening,” the young psychic mutters as Peter turns his obsessiveness on her. “Every fucking time.”) Each member of this rich cast—like the married sister living in what Peter sees as a “mausoleum of a life” and the not-quite burned-out childhood friend—are smart, distinctive, and flawed. And each might carry their own book.
But as a story of romantic breakup and recovery, Peter’s tale is complete in itself. Mo David is daring not only with choosing the novella format but with his quirky, surprising descriptions, fast-paced but startling dialogue, and a hilarious point-of-view shift where the reader enters the mind of the statue of the angel Peter and Colin visit at a museum.
The novella format fits these attention-taxed times. But novellas, like novels, demand rich characters and a fresh, engaging plot if they’re going to grab and hold an audience. Prose that’s quirky and vigorous helps too. In Bring Your Lover Back, the author Mo David delivers on all fronts—and then some.
David, a Chicago-born, Manhattan-based writer (and trained barber), has published in the New York Times and Yolk Literary, and has a poetry collection, Mo David’s Blues. He studied at the Savannah College of Art and Design; that training shows in his new novella.
“Visuals are essential to me,” David explained, “not as an accessory to the writing but an extension of it.” He sees literature the way some musicians do, those who create visuals to go with an album, from the album cover art to the videos. These “all help build the world of the work and the vision of the artist. That’s what I hope to accomplish” with Bring Your Lover Back. David includes original artwork in his novella and there’s a “collector’s edition” with more, plus an embellished cover. At 78 pages, Bring Your Lover Back offers readers an original and absorbing world.
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Bring Your Lover Back
by Mo David
Bookbaby; 78 p.