Novel: The Dark Heart of the Sun

Tonight I have come up with a name for a novel I am thinking of writing:

The Dark Heart of the Sun

I like this name. It is much better than The Well, which was the original title. You need a good name. I need a good name to do anything. I can't write a story without knowing what it's going to be called first. The name serves as my base camp, the place I can always return and regroup.

The story is about a young monk who has left his monastery and returned home to live with his mother and father. As the story begins you do not know why he left, but later you will learn that he was disturbed by a scientific article which has found dark matter at the center of the sun. For whatever reason, he sees moral implications in this and therefore questions his belief in God.

At the story's beginning, the former monk has really begun to debauch himself. He frequents bars and hires a prostitute. Perhaps he should be trying to test the assumptions of his moral foundation in a deliberate way. That may provide the outward conflict that is missing so far.

During this time the man goes for walks in the woods behind an old college near his parent's house. Here he discovers an old well and becomes fascinated with it. He does research and learns it was built hundreds of years ago by the founders of the school, who had also founded Miskatonic University.

The central conflict should perhaps be not wanting to accept the world as it is. He resents the lifestyle of his family, particuarly his mother and father. He sees himself as opposed to the world and family life, and once he goes insane, ironically it is an old letter his mother wrote to him when he turned ten years old that brings him back sanity and then to God. At the end of the novel he returns to the monastery.

It should be established that the monastery for him is a place of peace and understanding.

Perhaps I should mention that this is going to be a horror story. The first horror is the old well and what he finds down there. Not sure yet, most of it's going to be exploring the mystery. Whatever is really down there ought to go unexplained or at least very indefinitely described, like in a Lovecraft story.

The second horror is after he returns to the surface, his change. Something has infected him and it is growing inside him.

This is what directly leads to his eventual breakdown and entering the hospital...etc, where you learn that the horror portion of the story never happened. The well is just a common well. He has been an unreliable narrator basically. But there should be some question of whether it was real.

This story, like Trinidad, should be mostly on the surface. I'm not interested in writing psychological stories. Continue the form you established with Trinidad, where we are kept outside of people's heads.

The book will be divided into three parts with a kind of play on words:

1) The Well
2) The Sick
3) The Well