Successful businessman Phoenix Adams has it all: wealth, status, a beautiful wife, and a respected position as an elder in his church. Yet as he lands in New York after closing the biggest deal of his career, an overwhelming emptiness threatens to consume him.
When a business acquaintance directs him to an unmarked door in Manhattan’s meatpacking district, Phoenix discovers a mysterious speakeasy that seems to exist outside of time. Here, the enigmatic owner, Mircea, invites him to enter the Purging Room – a circular chamber of impossible treasures where four legendary figures await: a sensual French novelist, a curious English storyteller, a brilliant psychologist, and a Celtic poet.
Each visitor forces Phoenix to confront the parts of himself he has severed and denied – his sensuality, his curiosity, his emotional truth, and his spiritual freedom. As the night deepens, Phoenix must choose between returning to his carefully constructed life or embracing the terrifying possibility of authentic existence.
“The Purging Room” is an elegant, philosophical novella about existential awakening, the courage to question, and the sacred journey toward becoming fully human.
Some doors can never be unopened.
Backstory
The idea for this novella was birthed at Kalien, our farm-retreat nestled in the Appalachian wilderness in Tennessee, around 2017. I wrote the original outline and several sample chapters, which were tragically lost when my computer crashed in 2022. However, perhaps that loss was its own kind of necessary purging.
After relocating to Barcelona, the artistic muse of this extraordinary city awakened the story once again. Drawing inspiration from the labyrinthian libraries of Jorge Luis Borges, the mysterious literary sanctuaries of Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s “Cemetery of Forgotten Books,” and the atmospheric club setting of Stephen King’s “The Breathing Method,” I found myself compelled to return to Phoenix Adams’ transformative journey through a mystical speakeasy surrounded by lost artistic, literary, and libation treasures.
At its heart, “The Purging Room” explores questions that have occupied me for years: How do we integrate the fragmented aspects of ourselves? What does it mean to live authentically? How might we find freedom not by escaping our humanity but by embracing it fully?
For the perfect reading experience, may I suggest savoring a glass (or two) of absinthe as you turn these pages? The Green Fairy has a way of dissolving boundaries between worlds, much like the threshold of the Purging Room itself. If you’ve never experienced this storied spirit, perhaps this is the perfect occasion to acquaint yourself with its ritual and revelations. Like Phoenix, you might find that certain thresholds are best crossed with the right companion in hand.
This novella represents my first work of fiction and my tenth book overall. Unlike my previous non-fiction works, this story allowed me to explore philosophical and spiritual themes through the lens of imagination—to create a space where readers might find their own questions reflected back to them.
Please consider accompanying Phoenix on his journey through the Purging Room. I hope it proves as meaningful to explore as it was to create.
With deep appreciation,
Randy
Here is an exclusive sample from “The Purging Room” for you, my courageous readers:
Phoenix stepped across the threshold and immediately halted, his body forgetting momentum as his senses struggled to process what lay before him. Where the speakeasy had been impressive, this was transcendent—a perfect circle of a room that seemed to exist outside of time itself. His eyes widened, pupils dilating to their fullest extent as they sought to absorb every detail.
The domed ceiling above portrayed a night sky unlike any he had seen on earth—constellations from different hemispheres impossibly coexisting, rendered in what appeared to be actual starlight rather than paint or artifice. Their soft glow illuminated the room in a light that felt both ancient and immediate.
The room’s curved walls were lined with bookshelves of dark wood that gleamed with the patina of reverent handling. Inset into the shelves, at the four cardinal points, hung artworks that caused Phoenix’s breath to stutter in his chest.
To the north hung what could only be Caravaggio’s lost “Nativity with St. Francis and St. Lawrence”—stolen decades ago from a Sicilian oratory and never recovered. The dramatic chiaroscuro captured divine light entering mortal darkness, the virgin mother’s face expressing both wonder and foreknowledge of suffering to come.
To the east, the missing panel from the Ghent Altarpiece—”The Just Judges”—its meticulous detail impossibly preserved, the faces of the riders seeming to regard Phoenix with knowing assessment.
To the south, a small but unmistakable Vermeer, one not cataloged in any art history book Phoenix had encountered—a woman seated at a window, her face turned slightly toward an unseen presence, her expression capturing the exact moment of transformation between one emotional state and another.
And to the west, most surprising of all, a work Phoenix recognized from countless reproductions but which had been destroyed during World War II—Marc’s “The Fate of the Animals,” its apocalyptic vision of destruction and transcendence a perfect embodiment of death and rebirth.
Phoenix’s hand rose involuntarily to his chest, pressing against his sternum as if to contain the expansion happening within it. His lips parted, but no words emerged.
“The four stages of transformation,” Dion said quietly beside him. “Recognition of suffering, judgment of the past, moment of choice, and finally, transfiguration through destruction.”
At the room’s center stood two leather armchairs facing each other a few feet apart. They weren’t identical—one in oxblood leather bore the impressions of countless sittings, while the midnight blue opposite remained firmer, less used. Between them, the ebony table held a silver tray with a fresh glass of absinthe and a small carafe of water.
But it was the bar that drew Phoenix’s attention next—curved along one section of the wall, its surface inlaid with amber that caught the starlight from above. Behind it stood bottles that could not possibly exist: pre-phylloxera Bordeaux, Chartreuse from before the monks were expelled from France, and absinthes from distilleries closed for over a century.
“Any spirit you’ve dreamed of sampling is yours to enjoy,” Dion said, following Phoenix’s gaze. “Mircea believes certain experiences should be savored, not merely cataloged.”
Phoenix nodded mutely, his throat too constricted with emotion to form words. He moved toward the bookshelves, drawn by an irresistible gravitational pull. His fingers trembled slightly as they hovered near the spines, afraid to touch what shouldn’t still exist.
Here was Hemingway’s lost suitcase of manuscripts, recovered and bound. There, the complete plays of Sophocles, not just the seven that survived. The lost books of Euclid’s “Elements.” The complete “Book of Thoth.” First editions signed by authors centuries dead. And impossibly, seemingly glowing with their own inner light, the books thought lost forever with the Library of Alexandria.
“How?” Phoenix finally managed, the single syllable emerging hoarse and inadequate.
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