Overlook: A Rock & Roll Fable

Overlook: A Rock and Roll Fable is a timely exploration of a musical legacy that delves into the mysteries of intuitive talent and creation. It’s a narrative that resonates with the current cultural climate, a dance between art and appreciation, between star and fan. It’s a chronicle of the last journey of a fictionalized incarnation of the great singer Richard Manuel of The Band as he travels back to his adopted home of Woodstock. There, he encounters Klokko, a lone mountain man searching for meaning beyond the music he has always turned to. The novel moves through landscapes redolent of mid-1980s America and deep into the effect of rock and roll on our collective soul. It’s about coming to terms with ourselves.

“Awash in symbolism, deep themes, exquisite local color, and a wide river of (north) American music, Overlook is a rich, mysterious joyride that is simultaneously tragic and weirdly unsettling.”
—John Burdick, HudsonValleyOne

Paul Smart worked as a writer and editor for over a dozen Hudson Valley and Catskill Mountain regional publications in a career that spanned a third of a century. In addition to Overlook, he is the author of Rock & Woodstock and With Different Eyes: A Covid Waltz in Words and Images. He currently lives in Guanajuato, Mexico, with his wife, Fawn, and son, Milo, where he is working on several film and library projects.

Softcover with a trim size of 5.5 x 8.5 inches and 254 pages. Released in 2023 by Recital Publishing.