MoHG Proof in Hand

Author Touts Heft of Weighty New Tome

Twenty-one years after I embarked on my adult writer’s journey with an eye toward professionalism, publication, awards and Baldwin’s ‘nice little shelf of books’ to leave behind, I’ve accomplished it all. Life’s work success. Every box checked. “Dreams do come true.”

But one last peak remained.

This is the mountain I had to climb. And now I hold a copy, hardbound and dust-jacketed, in my hand.

In many ways it represents my last major word as a novelist, at least one with grandiose ambition; it owes as much to John Irving’s early influence as Conroy, BEE, any number of others. Decades went into its writing. Hopes rested upon it; dreams took wing on it shoulders, but only to be dashed on the rocks of rejection. From the highest potentiality to the same low place of all unpublished epics: the trunk.

No more.

It’s Mansion of High Ghosts, it’s a baroque, darkly humorous, shocking excoriation of my own Gen X brethren, and at last it’s in print. Official release: May, 2021, in limited hardcover, paper and ebook editions.

As I pitched the project to Pat Conroy himself (now this is hubris), it’s Prince of Tides meets American Psycho. It’s a trio of Gen X narcissists, wastrels and rapine solipsists in search of permanent satisfactions, but finding none, they instead take out their frustrations on themselves and the world. It’s a suspenseful ride along a broken, boozy, haunted human highway as these characters hurtle head-first into an oncoming truckload of confusion, pain and building potential for outright violence. It strives to make one care about reprehensible characters, and to hear some of the peer review I received at Story River Books, it succeeds. I wish the reviewers, the editor and Conroy had seen this polished final draft, which offers a more refined and mature work many of those readers found fascinating and ambitious, if not entirely successful.

Is this version entirely successful? Who knows. To its author, who feels an enormous sense of release at being done with this burdensome, important piece of personal fiction after so many decades, it is the best it’s ever been; the best it will ever be, except for chasing down typesetting errors here at the end of the process. It is accomplished. Now our shelf is all-but sufficiently full. Now we may rest easy.