
She was 16-years-old from an affluent family, brilliant, stubbornly independent and beautiful. With blossoming opportunities for women in Kennedy’s Camelot, she could have become anyone and knew it. Unfortunately, Katie McLaren fell in love. The Eye of the Apocalypse is a portrait of an era dominated by big government and manipulation that affected American lives. Osiris was a concealed fraternity who controlled the US government; they put the country on a profitable path to war in Viet Nam and would gladly kill a President to get there. The story, set in Pittsburgh, is about hope and duty, drawing from Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, and entangled human relationships like the 1942 film classic Casablanca. “The Pill,” Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique, and Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl influenced girl’s in 1962-3 and, now again, in this story. Pressures on a girl like Katie, within and without, were willfulness, mistakes, guilt, intellectual growth, disturbing media, the bomb, the sexual revolution, betrayal, LSD, courage, misunderstood paranormal perception, and dumb luck. Her teacher, Dr. Korsakov, asked Katie, “How will you extract, from the clutter, your life; the only life that’s most meaningful for you?” Katie replied, “I don’t know, but I want to know.” Perhaps, more important, how would Katie deal with Michael Hawkins, a boy with an irrepressible spirit, seemingly sent to her by destiny, who she couldn’t resist?