House of Moonlight

In the marshlight country of Sac Prairie, Wisconsin, a boy named Steve lives with his grandfather Jasper and ventures into the orbit of Joel Merrihew, a rising pianist whose brilliance conceals a fracturing mind. What begins as a visit to the accomplished musician becomes an unsettling education in the cost of artistic obsession. Joel is consumed by César Franck's Symphony in D Minor, a work as darkly turbulent as his own restless soul, and Steve witnesses the collision between youthful wonder and the terrible weight of genius unmoored. Derleth writes with the patience of deep woods and the precision of a man who understands that some silences say more than music. This is not a story of redemption or rescue, but of a boy standing at the threshold of adult darkness and recognizing, perhaps too early, that creation and destruction often share the same hands. The Wisconsin landscape becomes its own character: flat, haunted, soaked in the peculiar light of a place where the line between the mundane and the transcendent grows thin.