Lightning Bug, the other Harington novel in which Latha Bourne plays a major role, is clearly related, and since the town of Stay More also has a significant part in the novel, all of Harington's' other novels that deal with Stay More are related. Interestingly, Ekaterina, which is set primarily in fictionalized or "shaded" versions of Pittsburgh and Eureka Springs, Arkansas, was sparked by a reviewer's naive response to The Choiring of the Trees.

That reviewer wanted to know just exactly what was actual and what was imagined in the fictional work, forgetting that storytellers always want their readers or listeners to believe their every word.

Ekaterina marvelously plays with the "actual" and the imagined, as does The Choiring of the Trees, and it has as its literary precedent the fantastic "realities" that Vladimir Nabokov created in his novels Lolita (1955) and Pale Fire (1962). It continues the...