-Writer, Publisher & Digital Artist-
DAVID MEMMOTT
NOW AVAILABLE FROM AMAZON, BARNES & NOBLE, BOOKSHOP.COM AND POWELL'S. LINK BELOW TO ORDER FROM PUBLISHER, SERVING HOUSE BOOKS
THE FURNACE ROOM
A novel by David Memmott
Publisher: Serving House Books of Raleigh, NC
William K. Lawrence, Editor-Chief
Release Date: June 25, 2026
ISBN 13: 9781972482162
6 X 9 trade edition paperback, 246 pgs., $14.95
Cover art: Don Gray
Cover design: Jacob Arms
To order from publisher:
www.servinghousebooks.com/furnaceroom
Fifteen year old Robbie Merlin’s turbulent coming-of-age draws him through the furnace room at his high school into the hidden Arthurian world of Dragon Light. Here he learns he is a Fire Tender charged with re-igniting the forge and freeing his dragon. Years later, with Dragon Light behind him and his thirty year teaching career at the same high school coming to an end, he mentors a talented artist in the afterschool program whose art raises the possibility Dragon Light really exists.
Fascinating, searching, tender-hearted, and wise, David Memmott’s The Furnace Room argues that behind every door exists a possibility space called stories, called rewriting and re-righting, called magic and mystery and monsters and myth, called fiction as a mode of transformative philosophy that can heal us in this culture’s noisy hospital of hurt. It’s less a coming-of-age novel—though, in a sense, it is certainly that—than it is a book about an age that could be coming if only we were courageous enough to imagine it into existence.
—Lance Olsen, author of An Inventory of Benevolent Butterflies
The Furnace Room will take your breath away. It’s a roller coaster ride that will take you from coming-of-age realism, into and out of phantasmagoria, and from Blackboard Jungle into and out of the dark unreal. In these pages are brilliant truths and troubling questions that will stay with you long after you finish reading. Buckle up. Tight turns and steep slopes ahead.
—Molly Gloss, award winning author of Wild Life and
The Dazzle of Day
David Memmott's second novel, THE FURNACE ROOM, is a long-anticipated prose wonderment from a writer lauded more for his poetry and short stories. Set in a deeply felt and authentic 1960s milieu, the book features a teenaged hero, Robbie Merlin, whose mix of noble and self-serving qualities make for an utterly believable character. The colorful cast of supporting characters live their own independent lives while perfectly complementing Robbie's quest. And like his own nature, his grail journey is an astonishing and alluring hybrid of the mythic and the quotidian. With surprises and revelations galore, this book is the seismic tracing of an entire life, deserving to be filmed by the Terry Gilliam who brought THE FISHER KING to the screen. Fans of Lev Grossman, Leif Enger and Jeffrey Ford will revel in this warm-hearted and astonishing tale.
—Paul Di Filippo, author of VANGIE'S GHOSTS, RIBOFUNK,
THE STEAMPUNK TRILOGY and others.
The Furnace Room kept surprising me, starting out like another coming-of-age-through-a-portal tale, but with a more realized reality, then goes on to become something bigger, encompassing the world from now back to 1964 through Boise, Idaho and Irish mythology into a new theory of dragons and quantum physics. A mind-expanding trip...
—Ernest Hogan, author of High Aztech and Guerrilla Mural of a Siren’s Song
HOWLER
They gather this day, your neighbors,
to bless the hunt,
to consecrate the traps,
make stronger the chains,
thicker the walls between us.
In a world no more than man
mere man becomes a beast
who runs through the streets
wild nature looking for a reason,
following a dream that slays
the earth inch by inch
and sinks like a stone
into still water.
My rheumy eyes smolder
in the dark. Should their light find me here,
the good folk will call their dogs.
I upset the balance.
What’s down there should never come up.
What’s up here will never go down voluntarily.
The noise sometimes hurts my ears,
drives me from the den
out of my body.
I am the beast unmade by man,
sadly dreaming, lost in the margins
where bad blood congeals
in hearts hardened by degrees.
Once released to drink the moon
I cannot be called back.
In every encounter
where mere man the beast
leaves more than man
flayed for a bounty,
our territory violated
for another boom and bust,
only disorder can follow.
They know this.
They cannot stand for long
on failing foundations.
Shining even a weak beam
into our homes catches us
blinking with blame.
You lie in cold sweat on a hot night
and hear me howling.
I’m the bedtime story that keeps you awake,
chasing little girls over the plains,
devouring grandmothers and assuming their shape.
I curl into a ball in a warm den,
warm in winter with fierce love,
tight in a ball in a space that cries
for fewer people
and more humanity.
#995, digital abstract
#985, digital abstract
David Memmott's sense of place extends from his piece of ground in northeastern Oregon to the space-time continuum of the universe itself. By turns prophetic, polemical, sensual, and humorous, [he speaks] in stalwart witness to the outer and inner landscapes that he calls home."
-- John Daniel, author of The Far Corner and Of Earth: Poems
