Set in Madison, Wisconsin, and New Haven, Connecticut, in the early days of the AIDS epidemic, Mourning Light is a semi-autobiographical love story. Our narrator, Reb (so named by his mother because of her love of the Daphne du Maurier novel Rebecca), is hounded by guilt over the death of his lover, Anthony, which took place on the same day Reb first met the handsome yet enigmatic Eric. Once Reb becomes convinced that Anthony has sent him a cryptic message from beyond the grave, he becomes obsessed with figuring out what it could mean. Told in a series of flashbacks and remembrances, the novel concludes with a whirlwind of revelations that both complicate and resolve Reb's view of his world and his lover.

Was Marcel Proust the last of the great classics or the first of the revolutionaries? Proust was thirty in 1901 and he died in 1922, living longer in the nineteenth century than he did in the twentieth. His work, especially the monumental sixteen-volume novel Remembrance of Things Past, draws its aesthetic affinities from the century of Baudelaire, Wagner, and Ruskin but at the same time escapes late nineteenth-century decadent aestheticism to reach toward an early twentieth-century modernist stance.