Coming soon.
I’ve written a lot over the past twenty years. Enough stuff that I’ve forgotten whole novels and swaths of short stories and novellas. Combined with my distaste for saving things, much of my production has been lost to time. That’s fine with me. My work isn’t the sort of thing that’s committed to stone tablets.
One book that I’ve never round-filed, even though it’s been two decades since I wrote it, is The Guilty. It’s the novel that snared my first agent, and every publisher we sent it to loved it yet couldn’t figure out how to make it fit into their market research. Consequently, The Guilty became a longtime resident of my sock drawer.
Another agent I had said books are in the sock drawer for a reason, but I strongly disagree. Yes, some books are terrible. Others just haven’t reached their time yet. The Guilty is one of the latter.
What is The Guilty? At its most basic, it’s a ghost story, but more than that, it explores the nature of man’s inhumanity to man. Taking place in West Germany in the 1960s, it talks about the evil that can be unleashed on the most vulnerable people when morals are tossed out the window. It is a topic that, unfortunately, has to be addressed again when it should have become received wisdom over the last eighty years.
I’ll discuss The Guilty further as we approach its May release date.