An OTBKB reader came to the Brooklyn Reading Works reading on Thursday night. Today she wrote me this interesting note. I am hoping to serialize the Park Slope portion of her novel, “The Influence of Absence.”

Who knew, when I was going to William Alexander JH51 in the J.D. era, sneaking cigarettes in the lee of the sunken stone house, that many years hence I’d be attending a literary event there??

It was so generous of you to offer to serialize the Park Slope portion of my second novel, “The Influence of Absence,” whose first few chapters take place in 1950’s Park Slope.

If I had to pitch the book in 25 words or less–It’s a bildingsroman, a prolonged-coming-of-age story wherein the heroine finally finds love in all the right places.

The first chapter is called Third Street, where it all began….

Speaking of Third Street, my mother once told me that the mystery house on the corner was once owned by witches, satanists! A young married couple that befriended her and took her to a Black Mass somewhere downtown (circa 1941).

She believed they put a hex on the house, which we called “the jinxed house on the corner” when I was growing up. (She did have an overactive imagination….)