On Wednesday morning of this week, I sent a copy of Devil’s Gut to my daughter in California. It was an expensive mailing; edits will be required and I’m waiting for two friends to deliver their proof-reading of the tome. However, my daughter wanted to read it immediately. I sent it off and like a parent sending his child off to the first day of school, there was some separation anxiety!
The synopsis of the manuscript follows: Devil’s Gut
Where the Veranda Club meets in Devil's Gut
History is an irrepressible force. Silent and lethal. A reckoning. Edward Kean is a prisoner of history, trapped in a reckoning with his family’s past: two unexplained fires and the slow drip of a poisonous industrial life. The Kean family is equally irrepressible, tireless entrepreneurs cut from the fabric of American mythology that values the coda of self-reliance. This passionate core is both liberating in its opportunity and repressive in its addictions. Edward wrestles with his place within Aberdeen, unable to distinguish between belonging (as in membership or inclusion) and belonging (as in ownership). He is young man of some talent, a dreamer, obsessed with a passionate need to make a difference, and like the pale knight in Keat’s poem he wanders the shores of Aberdeen Lake, “though the sedge has withered from the lake, and no birds sing.” A dreamer desperately trying to find his way back to reality.
The world had recently exploded in chaos, pushing dreams into the deeper corners of the heart, and many young men soldiered off to foreign lands where their dreams were hopelessly mangled or snuffed out with lost lives. Some men remained behind, often for obvious physical reasons, while for others the reasons seemed murky. Edward is rejected, despite numerous attempts to enlist. His repeated rejections felt murky, leaving him with a gap, a void, that could never be filled.
Returning to his hometown after college, he begins work in his father’s company, but finds himself forced to leave in an ugly family dispute. He lands a job as a writer with the local paper where his sense of integrity flourishes. Edward’s father is shot outside the family home, and the many strands of Edward’s destiny are hopelessly knotted. Moments later, a solitary figure walks into the bedroom of Edward’s mother, a Luger dangling from his right hand. In self-defense, she shoots the intruder. The dead body belongs to Jimmy ‘Watts’ Watson, Edwards best friend. Edward must peel back the layers of toxic poisoning that has permeated his entire life in Aberdeen. Sciences clash, economic priorities revealed, and the deeper secrets of unfortunate choices and passions from earlier years prove toxic in the present. Commitment and belonging face off in a desperate struggle. Passionate obsession is a double-edged sword in a community once known as the Devil’s Gut.
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