Wretched, reckless and haunted by the past, the men and women in Anne Baldo’s Morse Code for Romantics try to restart their sputtering hearts, seeking to turn their pain into pearls through connection, understanding and hope.
In Anne Baldo’s Morse Code for Romantics, patterns of life emerge—and break—in relationships both requited and otherwise. A restaurateur orchestrates a devious punishment for his wife’s lover. A desperate mother searches for her missing daughter, a modern-day Persephone who was lured away by a sinister boyfriend. An islander falls under the spell of a visiting researcher, whose insidious smiles and natural sangfroid mirror the serpent-like sea monster he hunts.
These wistful, darkly surreal stories, set in Southern Ontario, suggest that maternal instinct is not just a chemical lie but something bloody and painful; that one person’s clouds can rain on generations; and that true loneliness can be as clear as code written on a face, and as ominous as a dark, monstrous shape lurking beneath the surface.