Guy Ridley
Guy Ridley, in his late fifties, runs a second-hand bookstore near an urban university in the American Midwest. He understands academic procedures and might have been a scholar and teacher himself, but now he walks along a parallel road that no academic would take. Devoted to Cervantes’ novel Don Quixote, he writes short stories to express his insights as he struggles with several challenges:
- He and the wife he still loves have been separated for many years. He’d like them to get back together.
- He wants to resolve an old scandal that precipitated his wife’s departure from the school’s biology department while others stayed behind and still work mischief.
- He suffers from intermittent attacks of mental impairment during which he believes that demons assault him. At such times, he imagines that Don Quixote and his sidekick Sancho will rescue him.