Evening's Empire

Evening is a small town on the Oregon coast, famous for its cheeses. Russell Kent, an opera composer from Massachusetts, lost his beloved wife there a year ago to a freak accident, and returns now to confront his ghosts. Kent has been commissioned to write an opera based upon Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, which story fills his dreams, and only in Evening does he feel himself able to return to work. There, he also discovers many strange things (even beyond the cheese sculptures), finds new love and new friendship, and is initiated into a fantastic secret the whole populace is hiding in a cavern beneath the town.

David Herter lives in Seattle, Washington.