Daniel Krajack worked almost a dozen years as copy editor for both the Republican Journal and the Waldo Independent in the 1980s and '90s. 

A few million words passed beneath his thick glasses, all of them checked for spelling, grammar – and their literary rightness.

Now, Krajack has put together 50,000 or so words of his own in a debut novel called Visiting Hope that will be for sale locally starting next week.

Krajack wrote the book almost a decade ago, when he was healthy and strong and actively irreverent. And a drinker of beer and other spirits, as he'd be the first to tell you. If he could.

For more time than he'd like to account for, Krajack has been bed-ridden and mostly speechless, afflicted by a progressive neurological disorder called corticobasal degeneration. CBD is rare and cruel, gradually robbing its victims of mobility and speech. 

Despite the disorder, Krajack is able to communicate with hand signals and, occasionally, with spoken words. He has been a full participant in production of his novel with his friends Magdalena Legocki, a med tech at Bayview Manor in Searsport, where he lives, and Jay Davis of Belfast, his editor at the Journal and the Independent.

The book was produced by Maine Authors Publishing of Rockland, with a cover design by Norma Whitman of Monroe. Davis and Legocki were the primary editors.

The synopsis of Visiting Hope printed on the back cover reads, “So what's this about? A man stands in front of the Terminal Cafe quaffing a beer on the cover of a novel called Visiting Hope. Inside, a man – perhaps the very same one – walks into a hospital to watch his friend die, but he doesn't. Life and death, humor and pathos, talking dogs and mysterious barstool mates.

“In this quixotic first novel, Daniel Krajack weaves an at-times surreal and at times all-too-real story of a man and his life. The threads of this entertaining tale form complex and unexpected patterns as they are pulled through to the inevitable conclusion. There is indeed a visit to hope inside this novel. But that's just for starters. It's as if Albert Camus and Bertolt Brecht walked into a bar together and had a few.”

Legocki has worked at Bayview Manor for more than two years. She said, “Dan let me read  a photocopied manuscript of Visiting Hope and I was struck by its originality, its potential, its many layers and clues for a reader to discover, and I talked to him about the book being professionally published. He didn't seem to share my enthusiasm about the project  in the beginning. But now he is in; on board as much as he can be in this, probably the last great event in his life.”

The novel's main character is a nameless man who has a friend named Ben who is sick and about to die. The man identifies with Ben and embraces his last days, and his demise, as if they were his own. The narrator has a fine sense of humor and a simplistically complex perspective on the world.

Davis, who has been a friend of Krajack for more than 25 years, was struck by the novel's surreal descriptions of a landscape that will be familiar to Maine readers. And to the parallels between the narrator's unselfconscious journey toward death and the trajectory of Krajack's last few years, though he was healthy when he wrote the book.

“I'm not sure how aware Dan was of his illness when he wrote Visiting Hope,” Davis said, “but there is an eerie similarity between the book and what's happened to him medically. Thankfully, his offbeat sense of humor is even stronger than his fatalistic message.”

A public gathering to celebrate the book's publication will be held at Left Bank Books on Church Street in Belfast on Sunday, Nov. 23 from 4:30 to 5:30 p.m. Copies of Visiting Hope will be on sale and light refreshments, including homemade Polish bread, will be served. If he's able, Krajack will be on hand.