ON
PROVENANCE: WHAT MAKES HEUER TICK
Who we are and what we are depends on how
honest we choose to be. At least that’s how my character Jürgen Heuer
(pronounced ‘lawyer’) likes to play it out in life and death. Born in Bremen,
Germany with summers spent in the Austrian Tyrol he is literally preprogrammed
to be a romantic.
His mother, a dreamer raised on Schumann,
palinka shots and weeping Hungarian violins demands it. “Love, my love, and
desire—Sensucht—longing: These
are the things that make the history, the things upon which great legends are
built. Without these, you have dust in your mouth.”
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Yet Heuer’s
love for things musical “the cicada’s song” or lyrical “... her tangs of violet
commixing with scents of must, like the old place back home in Europe” are
squelched by history and a profound belief that he is “born bad” and cannot
undo it.
“Small, both in mind and body, he had tremendous appetites, all of
which skewed towards becoming more than what he actually was.” An apropos
description not of the man, but of the father, Werner, whose tastes “...
classic in [their] narcissism, embraced the moldy old ethos of ethnicity over
geography, and, as such, he was first in line when Anschluss came to Vienna...”
Werner Heuer has no time for art or music: “For him, the rhythmic
tapping of jackboots on pavement went beyond forced occupation; it was the end
of the road after a long trek.”
Eschewing his parents’ hang-ups, Heuer does his
best to build a life in America that is, by all accounts, immensely successful
and hardly lonely. But it is contrived. Dodging promotion, cruising the outer
banks that frame society, he keeps to himself, except when he toys with the
lives of others. When a young colleague joins the firm Heuer takes action, not
swiftly, but slowly, the way he likes it: “The decision to ruin a young man half
his age was taken lightly and on purpose, as if giving weight to the decision
conferred unjust power on the youth. To Heuer, it was personal, but also a test
to see if he could actually do it.”
All business, Heuer reminds me of another character, Irmtraut
Weibigand, currently under construction in POOR UNDERTAKER, a work in progress.
A woman of business, she wrestles with secret doubts
about the veracity of her citizenship, place in the community, and the
integrity of the people she tries to call friends. A raucous Chamber of
Commerce luncheon exacerbates this, when she rises in defense of her frenemy
Hartmut Fläche, whose effete manners and pomposity alight the simmering hatred
of fellow Chamber member Conrad Hickey. Defending Fläche’s right to exist,
Irmtraut loses her cool as she’s reminded that she’s as ‘foreign’ as he is even
though she has been a part of the community for nearly thirty years. Well read,
she cannot help but think of Shakespeare’s monster Caliban from the Tempest
making a subtle but conscious comparison to her own place on the ‘island’ that
is Portside, Michigan. Thinking back to her mother, her provenance and her
roots, she is cut at the knees, reminding herself that no matter how fine she
becomes, she will always wear homespun.
Like Irmtraut, like Werner, Heuer
wrestles with his identity which takes centre stage anno domini. His inane Germanity no longer an issue, Heuer wishes only to be
cared for and remembered.
Heuer Lost And Found
Unapologetic Lives
Book 1
A. B. Funkhauser
Genre: Adult, Contemporary, Fiction,
Metaphysical, Paranormal, Dark Humor
Publisher: Solstice Publishing
Date of Publication: April 23, 2015
Number of pages: 237
Word Count: 66,235
Formats available: Electronic, Paper Back
Cover Artist: Michelle Crocker
Book Description:
Unrepentant cooze hound lawyer Jürgen Heuer dies suddenly and unexpectedly in his litter-strewn home. Undiscovered, he rages against god, Nazis, deep fryers and analogous women who disappoint him.
At last found, he is delivered to Weibigand Brothers Funeral Home, a ramshackle establishment peopled with above average eccentrics, including boozy Enid, a former girl friend with serious denial issues. With her help and the help of a wise cracking spirit guide, Heuer will try to move on to the next plane. But before he can do this, he must endure an inept embalming, feral whispers, and Enid’s flawed recollections of their murky past.
Available at
Amazon and Book Goodies
Add it to your Goodreads List
Reviews:
Fresh writing filled with rich
vocabulary, this story features a vivid cast of colourful, living-breathing
characters. This one will keep you reading late into the night until the final
page.—Yvonne Hess, Charter Member, The Brooklin 7
Ms. A.B Funkhauser is a brilliant
and wacky writer …Her distinctive voice tells an intriguing story that mixes
moral conflicts with dark humor.—Rachael Stapleton, Author, The Temple of
Indra’s Jewel and Curse of the Purple Delhi Sapphire
The macabre black comedy is
definitely a different sort of book! You will enjoy this book with its mixture
of horror and humour. —Diana Harrison, Author, Always and Forever
Heuer Lost and Found is a quirky
and irreverent story about a man who dies and finds his spirit trapped in a
funeral home with an ex-lover who happens to be the mortician. The
characterization is rich the story well-told.—Cryssa Bazos, Writer’s Community
of Durham Region, Ontario, Canada
Author A. B. Funkhauser strikes a
macabre cord with her book "Heuer Lost and Found". I found it to have
a similar feel to the HBO series "Six Feet Under".--Young,
Author, A Harem Boy’s Saga Vol I, II, and III
Short
Excerpt:
Enid Krause nee
Engler had made her way down to the embalming room where he lay waiting for
her. She paused on her way to dither over some emails and, he noted with
approval, to check out Kijiji for vintage GTO’s. Next, she mucked about with
the coffee maker, juicing up her brew with two bags of pre-packaged Columbian.
This, he noted wryly, was not the wisest thing to do when one’s hands were
already shaky. It was apparent to him that she liked her booze as much as he
did, and if she were to play around with sharp things, she stood a good chance
of facing him sooner, rather than later.
“It is here that
you must speak to her,” the lamp intruded, muddling his thoughts and destroying
his pleasure. He did not like this popping in and out at will inside his head.
He hoped her powers were limited to audiences in the basement, but not so—she
was a body trapped in a house she did not choose, yet her spirit travelled,
permeating the mind at will. “If you want to move on, it must be so. Put things
right, mein Schön.”
He frowned at
her use of ‘Schön.’ It was his term of endearment, yet she took it for her own,
as if her right to trample him escheated once he agreed to do her bidding.
Make amends.
Sure. The Holy Moly Book of Hooey said so, but to which place would he go
thereafter? The land of milk and honey, where everyone ran around in bed
sheets? Or the other place, where no amount of sunscreen would help? “Neither,”
the lamp said confidently, her words ironic, because she was a lamp and obviously
hadn’t been anywhere. “To your purpose,” she said, twisting him in the
direction of Enid, who muttered under her breath as she fumbled with her
earrings.
He grinned,
longing to see what she would do next: Fraulein Engler was obviously struggling
over his dramatic return, and for good reason. They had not parted on the best
of terms. She wept sentimentally in the coroner’s suite—woman’s tears—much to
her colleague’s chagrin, and now she was dragging her feet like a shotgun
bride. Walking alongside her, he thought about theatres and floorboards and
actors moving from mark to mark, their steps mapped out strategically on the
floor with sticky tape. “This is why people spend so much time and money on
make believe, Mächen,” he said. “It’s so much better to watch.”
Enid managed to
get past the door that separated the O.R. from Weibigand’s outer hall, where
she was greeted by the buzz and hum of a big fan that would keep his stink off
of her. He concentrated on the noisy traffic that was her brain: like car tires
spinning, rubber burning, a lonely heart hammering, and an incomprehensible
fear. He was in despicable shape and it would take every ounce of skill to
bring him to heel.
About the Author:
A.B. Funkhauser is a funeral director, fiction writer and wildlife enthusiast living in Ontario, Canada. Like most funeral directors, she is governed by a strong sense of altruism fueled by the belief that life chooses us and we not it.
“Were it not for the calling, I would have just as likely remained an office assistant shuffling files around, and would have been happy doing so.”
Life had another plan. After a long day at the funeral home in the waning months of winter 2010, she looked down the long hall joining the director’s office to the back door leading three steps up and out into the parking lot. At that moment a thought occurred: What if a slightly life-challenged mortician tripped over her man shoes and landed squarely on her posterior, only to learn that someone she once knew and cared about had died, and that she was next on the staff roster to care for his remains?
Like funeral directing, the writing called, and four years and several drafts later, Heuer Lost and Found was born.
What’s a Heuer? Beyond a word rhyming with “lawyer,” Heuer the lawyer is a man conflicted. Complex, layered, and very dead, he counts on the ministrations of the funeral director to set him free. A labor of love and a quintessential muse, Heuer has gone on to inspire four other full length works and over a dozen short stories.
“To my husband John and my children Adam and Melina, I owe thanks for the encouragement, the support, and the belief that what I was doing was as important as anything I’ve tackled before at work or in art.”
Funkhauser is currently working on a new manuscript begun in November during NaNoWriMo 2014.
Website: www.abfunkhauser.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/iamfunkhauser
Facebook: www.facebook.com/heuerlostandfound
Publisher: http://solsticepublishing.com/
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