A PAGE-TURNER WITH POETRY DISGUISED AS PROSE - Linda Delayen

"There are times when Clayton's prose becomes pure poetry. This is an author with great potential."

ONE GOOD READ! = Lawrence Johnson

Alec Clayton's Until The Dawn is indeed a wise, wonderful, gritty and honest book."

STUNNING DEBUT NOVEL BY A WISE NEW VOICE IN AMERICAN FICTION - Dave Gantt for amazon.com

"... a fascinating and gritty story of the art world. ... It is incredibly evocative, at times shocking and at times charming and beautiful."

GREAT READ! - Bob Appleton for amazon.com, author of Running Out of Road

"Clayton is an excellent writer and has a way of pulling at your heart-strings."

Much like a ride on a high speed train...

Review by Lisa Cyr, Buzz24.com

In what ways do the lives of our ancestors influence the direction and focus of our own lives? What forces during your lifetime helped push you along your path? The quest for answering these types of questions may be assisted by the creative efforts of Olympian author, artist and publisher Alec Clayton as he explores the roots of artistic expression in his novel, Until the Dawn.

Alec's 30+ years of personal artistic experience has given him the energy and know-how to imagine and convey the motivations of a creative genius such as the story's central character, the chaotic art-star, Travis "Red" Warner. A childhood friend, Johnny Lewis, leads us through most Red's enigmatic life while exploring his own intertwined relationships.

Until the Dawn plows through the time both before and during Red's colorful and tumultuous existence much like a ride on a high speed train hopping between segregated Mississippi of the 1960's and modern day New York City. Alec's frank exploration of human themes such as sexuality and racism keep the reader engaged and enthusiastic while wanting even more.

PAIN, BEAUTY AND WONDERMENT

Review by Larry Johnson for Southern Quarterly, December 2002

In 1982 a legendary, hardliving artist vanishes from the glitzy, coke-infused New York art scene after a violent and bloody self-confrontation at a party in honor of his new exhibition. This is Travis "Red" Warner, ambivalent genius, who has taken New York by storm after appearing out of the rustic depths of Tupelo, Mississippi. But then that same rural hamlet produced Elvis Presley, so why not? To discover the whys and hows in this tale is the work of Johnny Lewis, childhood friend of Travis, who narrates most of the story through a familial investigation going back to1919 and taking in some of the major events of the twentieth century as reflected by Travis' forebears and himself. Johnny is obsessed with Travis because he has been attracted to him all his life; he is obsessed with Red Warner because of his artistic talent, and he wants to know what turned the earlier incarnation into the later. Calling most of the artists he knows "effete wimps," Red Warner says "They don't know that painting doesn't come from the eye and the hand; it comes from the gut and farther down. They don't know that the seat of art is a hard dick." Johnny Lewis understands this fully, however. He sees Warner as "the last of the agonized geniuses," and, comfortable with his own homosexuality, knows that his old friend has fought a battle all his life to come to terms with the same urges, which would seem to go against the instincts of the Travis Warner we see in his high school days as a football hero and womanizer.

Tracking Red Warner down and discovering his elder kin's histories is a problematic road trip of self-discovery for Johnny Lewis as well. In good time, though, as the narrator examines the Warner family's past, their adoption into their midst of Travis' mother, her various battles with Travis' renegade father, Travis' relationship with his "sister" Cassie, and the southern ferment of the fifties and early sixties, all seems to flow understandably into a union of manifestations that perfects the novel's plot and gives the reader a sense of grace under tension. Blooming bodily desires, racism, and rock and roll take their turns enlivening the plot, yet the writer's primary concern is to focus on the growth of an artistic imagination in such fertile ground.

In other words, Alec Clayton, native of Tupelo, Mississippi, and stunning visual artist in oil and canvas himself, has given us an excellent first novel that holds the mirror up to a Southern past many of us have lived through but is never clichéd. It also shows a New York art scene that Clayton himself witnessed in the early eighties and which his character Red Warner values as a terrible release, allowing him to come to terms with his own sexuality while trying "to build skeins of paint like the layered grit of shopping bag ladies with their many coats, to find an abstract form that spoke of the faded, Army green aura of alcoholics sleeping on the sidewalks, ashen faces and dull, boozy-pink rims around whitened eyes." Yes, those words inculcate the genius of Travis "Red" Warner, and the novel Until the Dawn makes that genius achingly clear for us, in all its pain, beauty, and wonderment. Therefore, one should fly to the nearest bookstore or computer screen to order it.

Which brings up the fact that Until the Dawn is an example of that new kind of book, the "electronic book" or "print on demand" work. One might naturally ask what it looks like, how well it's put together, etc. Is it a "real" book? Is its literary quality imaged in the format? The answer to these last two questions is a resounding yes! This is a trade paperback book and it looks as good as any other trade paperback published by any major publishing house. The cover contains a beautiful color photograph, the author's photograph appears on the back, the print is excellent and well defined on good paper and there are very few typographical errors. All that and the fact that this work never has to go out of print and can be ordered online or at any bookstore make for the wave of the future. Doubtless there will be many more works of inferior quality published in the "print on demand" format than books like Until the Dawn, but when was it ever any different with the major houses? Too many wretched novels are published every year while superior works like this one are rejected, and this reviewer therefore champions the "electronic book" as a long-needed remedy for the situation. Congratulations to Xlibris for their vision and congratulations to Alec Clayton for his powerful, gutsy, and honest novel. Is this a "real" book? Hell yes—and then some!

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You can buy this book at
Orca Books Olympia, WA	Kindle edition available here
	autographed copies or other ordering options by check or PayPal from ClaytonWorks here