From Quirky Love Story to Philosophical Turn

Life As Transformation

Beyond Henry is a philosophical novella that begins as a quirky love story, but the final chapters turn the entire book into something much stranger. It opens with Henry experiencing the birth of a beautiful relationship, and ends with the birth of someone beyond Henry.

Henry is eccentric, charming, loves boats, hates where he lives, and considers escaping day-to-day life by sailing straight out to sea. Then he meets Valerie, and the book becomes a story of a sensual tumultuous romance. Valerie speaks to him from a place so clear and intense it becomes disarming, and their relationship unfolds as a constant transformation—two people changing each other's inner world, disconnecting, reconnecting.

A Novella That Changes Shape and Genre

Beyond Henry belongs to the same loosely metaphysical thread running through Marks's fiction as Orbiting Chaos, a 2007 novel about two people whose relationship changes both of them in multiple ways. Both books use romance as the entry point into the more existential questions underneath.

Beyond Henry simply waits until its final chapters to reveal how far those questions actually go.

Of all his novellas, Beyond Henry is the one that takes the biggest risk. Marks has called it the hardest to categorize by genre, since the category changes before the story ends. Readers who expect a tidy romantic arc will feel the ground shift under them when Henry's own life is in danger. The end of the story then accelerates past Henry.  

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